Lottocracy

Must democracy involve elections? Election is a time-honored, but arguably deeply flawed part of all modern democracies. But what if representatives were chosen randomly–by lottery? Is this still democracy, and of a less elitist kind? In this lecture we will compare the merits of the method of election to those of a carefully designed system of “lottocracy.” The lecture has two main aims. The first is to present a case against what is the heart of almost every modern political system: the use of elections to choose political representatives. The second is to move past what we might call the “Churchillian shrug” (‘the worst form of government, except for all the others…’) by introducing and defending lottocracy, a new kind of political system with a very different heart: a system that uses random selection, rather than elections, to select political representatives. Lottocracy may have the upper hand.