On Lottocracy

Full lottocracy is most likely no good but integrated sortition could be somewhat promising when handled carefully.

Most of my argument is pulling from the work of Adela Gąsiorowska and especially Daniel Hutton Ferris. To be clear, until otherwise stated, I am talking particularly about full lottocracy.

While reading David Pinsof’s essay, Democracy is Bullshit, I learned of a potentially better governing system that could replace Democracy called “Lottocracy”. Upon learning about it, I went through four distinct phases of understanding it:

1. What?

2. This probably won’t work.

3. Well maybe it would work, actually?

4. This very likely won’t work and the risk is too high to try and find out.

The basic argument of lottocracy is that democracies, despite their pretenses to represent the people, are deeply susceptible to and select for party elites that are good at campaigning, ideological positioning, spouting populist rhetoric, and self-marketing instead of you know, properly running a country. On the other side, voters are deeply biased, too prone to group think and “good vs evil” narratives to rationally select a competent leader who can properly run a country. Thus democracy, while still better than autocracy, is a pretty bad form of governance.1 I (mostly) have no qualms with such an argument. Democracies as they are today do not have good incentive structures for selecting competent political leaders.

What lottocracy proposes, then, is to scrap elections entirely in favor of a system that more closely resembles how juries work. That is, citizens are selected at random to serve in assemblies that deliberate over public policy and make governing decisions on behalf of the population as a whole.

In theory, such a system can seem superior to our current one. Randomly selecting citizens prevents many of the major problems facing our current system, including elite capture, wealthy influence, inflammatory public politics, irrational voting, group think, and political careerism. But when lottocracy is put into practice, its vulnerabilities and structural weaknesses begin to show as well.

Gasiorowska’s paper examined whether the selection processes used for real-world citizens’ assemblies actually reflected the principles of sortition. She analyzed 29 assemblies held between 2020 and 2021 in nine European countries, evaluating them for randomness, demographic representativeness, and equal opportunity. What she found was that while the participants were demographically representative, in many instances they were not selected through a genuinely random or equally accessible process.

1. On randomness: 28 out of 29 were classified as near-random at the invitation phase and then 21 out of 29 were classified as near-random by the final selection stage.

2. On equal opportunity: 21 out of 29 met the equality standards and then only 15 out of 29 met the equality standards by the final selection stage.

There was also an issue of transparency. For whatever reason, Gasiorowska had trouble collecting data on many of these assemblies, whether that be because it was not available, technical reasons, or just not being fully disclosed to her by the assemblies.

This obviously does not mean lottocracy is a total crack, it just means even from a purely structural stand point lottocracies will inevitably face many (perhaps just as many or more) of the real-world structural issues democracy currently faces.2

Daniel Hutton Ferris is directly critical of full lottocracy from a theoretical stand point.

One of the main arguments that Ferris makes against the system—which I agree with—is that ultimately a randomly selected citizen serving as a short term legislator will be made to confront powerful interests and coalitions (corporate lobbyists, professional bureaucracies, military institutions) and thus may be more vulnerable to capture than those in the current system.

He argues that neither short nor long terms solve the problem:

1. Short terms prevent citizens from acquiring expertise and make bureaucratic capture more likely.

2. Long terms give outside interests time to cultivate influence and create opportunities for post-office rewards.

Ferris uses military coercion as a stark example of how vulnerable selected citizens would be to elite capture:

Although elected representatives are probably too susceptible to military pressure, a lottocratic legislature may be far more vulnerable to capture because ordinary citizens are sometimes very deferential to military elites (Golby et al., 2018) and would be much less likely to feel motivated and knowledgeable enough to push back against undue pressure from the generals.

Ferris also argues political parties in democracies serve an important function of bundling together singular interests (unions, environmental organizations, business groups, etc.) into cohesive multi-faceted coalitions.3 And despite their obvious flaws, they also offer a cheap way for ordinary citizens to get politically involved. Under a lottocracy, however, citizens’ incentives to remain politically informed would weaken considerably, causing political knowledge to atrophy and making it increasingly likely that lottocratic bodies would select uninformed citizens who are more vulnerable to capture.

After all, this would require abolishing the legislative role for parties, which would stretch already existing gaps in knowledge, attention, and participation between elite and non-elite citizens. The latter are much more reliant on the legibility provided by partisan storytelling and public justification and on the cheap opportunities to participate in very large political coalitions that partisan politics provides. A post-electoral lottocracy would therefore deplete crucial sources of information and attentiveness for ordinary people. It would also be likely to widen participation gaps: by eliminating the lowest cost formally empowered political practice; by drying up partisan sources of interest and information; and by reducing the participation-promoting civic virtues that legislative elections appear to help generate, such as political interest (Zeglovits and Zandonella, 2013) and a sense of participatory competence (Valentino et al., 2009). Eliminating legislative elections threatens to instigate a vicious cycle of political de-skilling and disengagement that would cause greater problems for those who rely more on partisan legibility and mobilization.

Ferris develops his arguments against full lottocracy in much greater detail in his paper, but I only wanted to outline the basic case here. The central point I’m making is that replacing our current system with an entirely new one, despite its many vulnerabilities, would be far riskier than reforming the system we already have. Such a transition could leave us with a political system that is even much more corrupt and unequal than the one we have now. Full lottocracy may therefore be an interesting thought experiment, but it is not a practical solution to the problems facing our current system.

Ferris closes his paper by considering a potential hybrid system that would integrate lottocratic institutions into our existing democratic framework. This approach holds more promise.

In his view, random citizen assemblies would function best as integrated focus groups. They would deliberate with political professionals and other specialized interest groups exposing gaps in their knowledge or attention, scrutinize officials and policy choices, show officials how regular citizens relate to specific policies, and offer a form of public representation to normal citizens making it easier to organize around shared concerns.

Of course, even this is not without its flaws as critics have pointed out that skilled politicians and activists could still dominate normal citizens or frame issues to them in a way that benefit their own self interest.

But genuine public representation is important because it puts non-elite concerns in the same room as elite interests. This provides at least some check on unrestrained elite self-interest while also exposing the hypocrisy of elites who promise one thing but pursue another.

Like Ferris, I do think we should seriously consider looking further into integrating lottocracy within our current democratic arrangement. Perhaps such a system is something worth writing about in more detail at a later time.