Would randomly selecting legislators be more democratic than electing them? Lottocrats argue (reasonably) that contemporary regimes are not very democratic and (more questionably) that replacing elections with sortition would mitigate elite capture and improve political decisions. I argue that a lottocracy would, in fact, be likely to perform worse on these metrics than a system of representation that appoints at least some legislators using election – a psephocracy (from psēphizein, to vote). Even today's actually existing psephocracies, which are far (...) from ideally democratic, are better suited than a lottocracy would be to meet the demands of democratic citizenship (politics must be legible to ordinary people, who must have low-cost opportunities to participate) and the demands of democratic leadership (powerful representatives should be specialized and constrained by competitions for popular support). Democrats therefore have weighty instrumental reasons to reject lottocracy and work to democratize psephocracy, instead. (shrink)

This paper critically compares a deliberative system based on parliamentary elections (an electoral system) and a deliberative system based on sortition (a lottocratic system). Both systems are analyzed in three dimensions. The epistemic dimension concerns the rational quality of the democratic process. The power dimension concerns the distribution of power and the extent to which citizens genuinely control all decisions. The motivational dimension, finally, concerns citizens’ identification with the decision-making process and their willingness to abide by its outcomes. We argue (...) that an electoral system is, in all three dimensions, normatively superior to a sortition-based system. Most prominently, we claim that electoral mechanisms provide visibility to the decision-making process. This enables a form of interactive representation in which citizens and their representatives engage in a joint process of opinion and will formation. Sortition, in contrast, is characterized by a democratically much poorer form of descriptive representation. The selected citizens are a representative sample of the wider citizenry, but they deliberate in a forum that remains mostly disconnected from that wider citizenry and therefore cannot shoulder the process of collective self-government. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

This article reviews two contrasting books on lottocracy that came out in 2024 – Alexander Guerrero's, Lottocracy: Democracy Without Elections and Cristina Lafont and Nadia Urbinati's The Lottocratic Mentality; Defending Democracy Against Lottocracy. Both are valuable additions to contemporary democratic theory's increasingly lively debates about the best way to conceptualise and institutionalise representative democracy. The review highlights the innovations that Guerrero brings to the presentation of lottocracy, and their implications for executive as well as legislative government, (...) but questions his attachment to microcosmic representation as a regulative political ideal. Although sympathetic to Lafont and Urbinati's critique of lottocracy, it casts doubt on their claim that lottocrats must confuse democracy and technocracy and require ‘blind deference’ to the decisions of randomly selected assemblies. It also questions their confidence that we can readily distinguish the ‘auxiliary’ non-legislative forms of citizen assembly, which they favour, from the ‘lottocratic mentality’ they reject. (shrink)

The comment on Cristina Lafont’s book includes two main points. (1) Minipublics do not necessarily stand in opposition to political theories that justify electoral democracy and participatory conceptions of deliberative democracy. In contrast to such a view, I argue that minipublics should be combined with electoral and participatory forms of democracy. (2) A deliberative concept of accountability may overcome some of the shortcomings of the traditional, voluntaristic concepts of democratic accountability.

Dissatisfaction with democratic institutions has run high in recent years. Perhaps as a result, political theorists have begun to turn their attention to possible alternative modes of political dec...

Many scholars working on democracy today draw our attention only to its upsides or its downsides—the dream or the nightmare. But Alexander Guerrero’s Lottocracy: Democracy without Elections is an admirable exception. While he recognizes that the positive and negative potentials of democracy….

Lottocracy and epistocracy have received deeply insightful attention as political regimes. Herein, by conducting an experiment using an online survey, we explored the extent to which public opinion is receptive to political decisions under various regimes regarding two environmental policies: education policy and environmental tax policy. By doing so, we examined whether the presence of tax burdens affected the acceptability of political regimes, i.e., electoral democracy, lottocracy, and epistocracy. Our results revealed that decisions based on lottocracy and (...) epistocracy were significantly less acceptable than those based on electoral democracy. Nevertheless, lottocratic and epistocratic decisions were more acceptable regarding the issue of environmental tax policy. The difference was mainly attributed to people's rejection of environmental tax policy offsetting their rejection of lottocracy and epistocracy. This suggests, first, that decisions based on electoral democracy increase policies' acceptability if they do not involve taxation, and second, that the status of whether or not a decision is electoral does not significantly affect policy acceptability if taxation is involved, whereas on the other hand, people are sensitive to differences between the regimes if the policy does not involve taxation. (shrink)

Recently, political models which employ lottery-selection instead of ballot voting have been proposed. Proponents argue that such lottocratic models can improve the representation of the population and reduce undemocratic influences. In this paper, I argue that these proposals also satisfy the egalitarian requirement of democracy. I claim that having an equal chance to be selected by lot is equally egalitarian as having an equally weighed vote for two reasons: first, having a chance to be selected by lot satisfies the requirement (...) for political justice better than electoral democracy, and second, it provides citizens with equal political influence and not merely equal impact. (shrink)

This article examines an argument for single-issue legislatures (SILs) as an alternative to typical decision-making procedures in representative democracies. It is argued that if this argument was successful, it could be extended to endorse decision-making processes utilizing advanced artificial intelligence. However, it is noted that this argument neglects an important feature of decision-making: authorization. It is important for its autonomy that a society must authorize certain decisions. If decisions were delegated to SILs or AI, this would undermine the autonomy of (...) the group. This does not entail that these alternatives have no role in policy-crafting. It is argued that so long as a community can authorize a decision, perhaps by a vote, it need not undermine autonomy. An important caveat of this, however, is that the decision must be explicable to the community. For AI usage, this motivates the need for explainable AI (XAI). (shrink)

There are many ways of evaluating legal and political institutions. This chapter introduces a new way to evaluate legal and political institutions: in terms of their sensibility. I define _sensibility_ as the ability to appreciate and to respond to the world as it is, with two distinct components: (1) appreciating (or understanding or knowing) the world as it is, and (2) responding to the world in light of this appreciation. The first of these concerns the epistemic capacities of institutions. The (...) second of these concerns the agential capacities of institutions. Having introduced the idea of sensibility, the chapter then focuses on a comparison of two different institutional arrangements—(1) electoral representative systems and (2) lottocratic systems of government, as introduced in this chapter—in terms of their epistemic quality or expected epistemic quality. I begin by drawing attention to several concerns about the sensibility of electoral representative institutions, focusing particularly on epistemic pathologies of those institutions. The second part of the chapter discusses an alternative kind of political institution, which I call a lottocratic political institution, and argues that we might well expect these institutions to be more sensible alternatives, at least under some conditions, on epistemic grounds. The negative contribution of the chapter, then, is to raise a series of challenges to the sensibility of electoral representative institutions. The positive contribution of the chapter is to suggest a direction for future institutional thinking, empirical study, and experimentation. (shrink)

I review Alex Guerrero's Lottocracy: Democracy with Elections focusing on its central argument: elections can no longer achieve the things we want from political institutions while lottocracy can. I argue Guerrero book is extremely impressive in its detail and ingenuity in thinking through lottocratic institutions, but is less conclusive in showing that elections are the ultimate culprit of the problems he identifies, which weakens his case that only lottocracy can solve the problems plaguing electoral democracies. Regardless, the (...) book is essential reading for future democratic theory. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Faced with the failures of existing democracies, many democratic theorists conclude from recent empirical work in political science critical of the functioning of electoral institutions that citizens are too ignorant to hold office-holders to account and that representative democracies are not responsive to ordinary citizens. We argue that these conclusions are unwarranted. They hinge on highly contestable interpretations of the work in question and conflict with important contrary theoretical and empirical findings that democratic theorists have ignored. If our argument is (...) convincing, it should weaken the case for alternative regime types (e.g., lottocracy or epistocracy), which rests in part on empirically grounding the assertion that representative democracies cannot deliver meaningful accountability. Our argument also highlights the importance of engaging with the social-scientific literature in a more careful and wide-ranging manner. (shrink)

In the context of the ongoing Common Knowledge symposium “Antipolitics,” this article responds skeptically to the numerous contributions calling for the supplanting of elections by sortition. While lottocracy is proposed as a solution to the flaws of electoral democracy — notably, corruption and violent partisanship — this response focuses on a single theoretical issue: the logic of chance or randomness, which, according to its proponents, should rid politics of corruption and relieve representation of partisanship so as to ultimately prevent (...) the formation of a ruling class separate from the rest of society. The problem with the solution, according to this essay, is that, however useful in many ways, the lottery system of lawmaking is not democratic. (shrink)

As part of the ongoing Common Knowledge symposium “Antipolitics,” this essay replies to an article by Nadia Urbinati: “The Sovereignty of Chance: Can Lottery Save Democracy?” Urbinati's piece expresses reservations about the tendency of symposium contributions to support what she terms “lottocracy.” Gastil's response argues (1) that random selection in politics can take many forms, none of which need resemble a lottocracy; (2) that a randomly selected body with some measure of influence or authority can complement electoral democracy (...) without replacing it; (3) that prohibiting democracies from experimenting with random selection would undermine their claim to being democratic; and (4) that evidence from experience with random selection warrants continuing to experiment with it as a means of revitalizing imperiled democratic systems. (shrink)

In this essay, I address some questions and challenges brought about by Thomas Christiano in his inspiring review of my book Democracy without Shortcuts. First, I defend the democratic credentials of the conception of self-government that I articulate in the book against conceptions of self-determination that are allegedly compatible with non-democratic government. To do so, I clarify some aspects of the notion of “blind deference” that I use in the book as a contrast concept to identify a minimal, necessary condition (...) for democratic self-government. In a second step, I clarify my criticism of deep pluralist conceptions of democracy and argue that Christiano’s own criticism does not seem to address the main challenge to which pure proceduralism is supposed to provide an answer. Lastly, I address Christiano’s contention that my criticism of lottocracy does not address the worries that lottocrats are responding to. I distinguish between populist and epistocratic worries and argue that both of them have anti-democratic roots and thus should be criticized rather than “responded to” in their own terms. (shrink)

In light of representative democracy’s failures, from an inability to effectively address pressing problems to the yawning economic inequality and deep polarization that it sustains, the need for reform is obvious and urgent. In the democratic theory literature, there is growing interest in the potential of lottery-based political institutions as replacements for traditional forms of electoral democracy. Alexander Guerrero’s Lottocracy (Oxford University Press, 2024) is among the most interesting, challenging, and provocative arguments for lottery-based political institutions. Engaging with its (...) arguments is a valuable opportunity to assess where the case for such institutions stands. In this critical essay, we develop concerns about (1) the critique of representative democracy that has given rise to interest in lottery-based solutions, and (2) the potential of lottery-based solutions to solve the problems that ail representative democracies. (shrink)

In the fourth installment of the Common Knowledge symposium “Antipolitics,” Nadia Urbinati criticized the lottocratic turn in political thought by, in part, using the case of China to cast doubt on whether lottocracy is a democratic form at all. This article, in response to Urbinati's prompt, focuses on the place and role of China's experimental lotteries and citizen assemblies in the global discussion of sortition and democracy. Those experiments, at the national but mostly local levels in China, are understood (...) differently from each of the three prevailing perspectives on Chinese governance: China as an orthodox authoritarian state, or a progressive and deliberative authoritarian state, or a kind of social science laboratory. Each perspective has its intellectual advantages and disadvantages, and the three are intricately interconnected. To consider the issue of China's experiments with sortition as a part of the lottocratic turn, we each need (a) to develop self-consciousness about which perspective we have adopted, (b) to realize the limits of each, (c) to learn from the other perspectives, and (d) to learn how to combine them. The complexity of, and manifold possibilities inherent in, Chinese governance have eclipsed the simplistic uses made of China in the Western social sciences. (shrink)

Cristina Lafont has written a searching and thought-provoking philosophical work on the nature of deliberation in modern democracy. Much of the book is a critique of recent efforts to ground the activity of deliberation in democracy in the light of two sobering and challenging obstacles to the implementation of deliberative democracy in modern society. One challenge arises from the observation of the pluralism of opinion and value in modern democracy. Good faith disagreement on principles and values is wide ranging in (...) modern societies and seems to undermine most kinds of consensus aside from the most abstract agreement. A second challenge arises from the division of labor in society and stems from the observation that citizens are often quite ignorant of politics in modern society. They often seem to base their decisions on slim grounds. In what follows, I cannot pretend to do justice to this rich and engrossing book. I will discuss the central concepts of self-government and blind deference first and point to a difficulty that I think lies at the heart of Lafont’s approach. I will then discuss her arguments against deep pluralism and suggest how I think they miss the target and how I think one ought to reply fully to pluralism. I will also take up her arguments against lottocracy, which I think are good ones. But I will argue that they are not sufficient to demonstrate why we should not be lottocrats. I will then conclude with some remarks about what is necessary to respond to the problems lottocracy is meant to respond to. (shrink)

Standards of democratic competence are implicit in many areas of democratic theory, playing a role in debates about the responsibilities of citizens, civic education, and more. The importance of establishing minimal requirements for democratic competence that all those committed to democracy can endorse is thus clear. In recent work, Alexandra Oprea and Daniel J. Stephens argue that a democratically competent voter is one who both knows how to and intends to vote in such a way that, if the relevant candidates (...) or policies were chosen, the predictable end of electoral democracy would not follow. In this paper I outline and discuss two complications for their account. First, I argue that in some cases a democratically competent voter may vote for an option that, if chosen, would bring about the predictable end of democracy. Second, I challenge their claim that democracy must involve the use of free and fair elections, urging instead that sortition—that is, the selection of public officials by lottery—can be legitimately democratic. Consequently, a democratically competent voter can intend to vote for an option that ends electoral democracy without intending the end of democracy entirely, provided that they intend to vote for a suitably democratic alternative based on the use of sortition. (shrink)

There is a growing sense that representative democracy is in crisis, leading to renewed interest in alternative institutional designs. One popular proposal—what I call legislative sortition —says we should replace elected legislators with randomly selected citizens. While legislative sortition has drawn both numerous supporters and critics, one objection has received little attention: that ordinary citizens’ lower cognitive abilities, relative to elected officials, will diminish the quality of governance. This paper articulates and evaluates this concern, distinguishing between several versions of it. (...) I argue that some forms of the objection are implausibly strong, but that a suitably qualified version can be defended. Although this does not provide a decisive reason to reject legislative sortition, it meaningfully shapes how we should assess its promise. (shrink)

In The Democratic Marketplace, Lisa Herzog offers a damning indictment of democratic capitalism. Among other things, she argues that capitalism has led to increased inequality, fosters an unhealthy culture of competition, that it is bad for the environment, and that it is ultimately bad for democracy itself. To save democracy we must pursue various reforms: we need to address economic inequality; we must abjure the unsustainable pursuit of economic growth and instead democratically determine the functions of the economy; and we (...) should give citizens more time for meaningful civic engagement. In this review essay I push back in defense of democratic capitalism, arguing that while Herzog overstates the negative aspects of capitalism, she also greatly understates its many benefits. Additionally, I show that her own distinctive proposals for how to democratize the economy face serious issues that should not be overlooked. Overall, expanding the scope of democratic politics is not as promising as many seem to think, while democratic capitalism is unjustifiably underappreciated. (shrink)

Discusses who should decide the result of legal trials, focusing on the jury system.