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Lottocracy or psephocracy? Democracy, elections, and random selection

Lookup NU author(s): Daniel Hutton FerrisORCiD

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Abstract

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. https://doi.org/10.1177/14748851231220555

Publication metadata

Author(s): Hutton Ferris D

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: European Journal of Political Theory

Year: 2023

Pages: epub ahead of print

Online publication date: 17/12/2023

Acceptance date: 24/11/2023

Date deposited: 19/12/2023

ISSN (print): 1474-8851

ISSN (electronic): 1741-2730

Publisher: Sage

URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/14748851231220555

DOI: 10.1177/14748851231220555

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