Lottocracy: Democracy Without Election

Alex Guerrero, Rutgers University, presents the Department of Philosophy’s Annual Sprague & Taylor Guest Lecture.

Democracy is in trouble. What is going wrong? What should we do? In this talk, Alex Guerrero argues that, perhaps surprisingly, the problem is with the heart of modern democracy: the election. Elections are failing as accountability mechanisms. Elections provide powerful short-term incentives, leading elected politicians to downplay long-term catastrophic concerns. Elections create division where none need exist. The most powerful among us take advantage of this to control who is elected, what policies are enacted, and which problems are ignored. What should we do? Guerrero suggests that we should move past the fatalist, Churchillian shrug (“the worst system, except for all the others that have been tried”) and try a new form of democracy: lottocracy. Lottocratic systems include many new elements, but the most striking is the shift from using elected representatives to using representatives selected through lottery. The talk presents and defends lottocracy as an alternative political system worth taking seriously.