Abstract

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.