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. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

The comment on Cristina Lafont’s book includes two main points. (1) Minipublics do not necessarily stand in opposition to political theories that justify electoral democracy and participatory conceptions of deliberative democracy. In contrast to such a view, I argue that minipublics should be combined with electoral and participatory forms of democracy. (2) A deliberative concept of accountability may overcome some of the shortcomings of the traditional, voluntaristic concepts of democratic accountability.

Dissatisfaction with democratic institutions has run high in recent years. Perhaps as a result, political theorists have begun to turn their attention to possible alternative modes of political dec...

This paper critically compares a deliberative system based on parliamentary elections (an electoral system) and a deliberative system based on sortition (a lottocratic system). Both systems are analyzed in three dimensions. The epistemic dimension concerns the rational quality of the democratic process. The power dimension concerns the distribution of power and the extent to which citizens genuinely control all decisions. The motivational dimension, finally, concerns citizens’ identification with the decision-making process and their willingness to abide by its outcomes. We argue (...) that an electoral system is, in all three dimensions, normatively superior to a sortition-based system. Most prominently, we claim that electoral mechanisms provide visibility to the decision-making process. This enables a form of interactive representation in which citizens and their representatives engage in a joint process of opinion and will formation. Sortition, in contrast, is characterized by a democratically much poorer form of descriptive representation. The selected citizens are a representative sample of the wider citizenry, but they deliberate in a forum that remains mostly disconnected from that wider citizenry and therefore cannot shoulder the process of collective self-government. (shrink)

Recently, political models which employ lottery-selection instead of ballot voting have been proposed. Proponents argue that such lottocratic models can improve the representation of the population and reduce undemocratic influences. In this paper, I argue that these proposals also satisfy the egalitarian requirement of democracy. I claim that having an equal chance to be selected by lot is equally egalitarian as having an equally weighed vote for two reasons: first, having a chance to be selected by lot satisfies the requirement (...) for political justice better than electoral democracy, and second, it provides citizens with equal political influence and not merely equal impact. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Cristina Lafont has written a searching and thought-provoking philosophical work on the nature of deliberation in modern democracy. Much of the book is a critique of recent efforts to ground the activity of deliberation in democracy in the light of two sobering and challenging obstacles to the implementation of deliberative democracy in modern society. One challenge arises from the observation of the pluralism of opinion and value in modern democracy. Good faith disagreement on principles and values is wide ranging in (...) modern societies and seems to undermine most kinds of consensus aside from the most abstract agreement. A second challenge arises from the division of labor in society and stems from the observation that citizens are often quite ignorant of politics in modern society. They often seem to base their decisions on slim grounds. In what follows, I cannot pretend to do justice to this rich and engrossing book. I will discuss the central concepts of self-government and blind deference first and point to a difficulty that I think lies at the heart of Lafont’s approach. I will then discuss her arguments against deep pluralism and suggest how I think they miss the target and how I think one ought to reply fully to pluralism. I will also take up her arguments against lottocracy, which I think are good ones. But I will argue that they are not sufficient to demonstrate why we should not be lottocrats. I will then conclude with some remarks about what is necessary to respond to the problems lottocracy is meant to respond to. (shrink)

This paper looks at Alexander Guerrero’s epistemic case for ‘lottocracy’, or government by randomly selected citizen assemblies. It argues that Guerrero fails to show that citizen expertise is more likely to be elicited and brought to bear on democratic politics if we replace elections with random selection. However, randomly selected citizen assemblies can be valuable deliberative and participative additions to elected and appointed institutions even when citizens are not bearers of special knowledge or virtue individually or collectively.

In this essay, I address some questions and challenges brought about by Thomas Christiano in his inspiring review of my book Democracy without Shortcuts. First, I defend the democratic credentials of the conception of self-government that I articulate in the book against conceptions of self-determination that are allegedly compatible with non-democratic government. To do so, I clarify some aspects of the notion of “blind deference” that I use in the book as a contrast concept to identify a minimal, necessary condition (...) for democratic self-government. In a second step, I clarify my criticism of deep pluralist conceptions of democracy and argue that Christiano’s own criticism does not seem to address the main challenge to which pure proceduralism is supposed to provide an answer. Lastly, I address Christiano’s contention that my criticism of lottocracy does not address the worries that lottocrats are responding to. I distinguish between populist and epistocratic worries and argue that both of them have anti-democratic roots and thus should be criticized rather than “responded to” in their own terms. (shrink)

In the context of the ongoing Common Knowledge symposium “Antipolitics,” this article responds skeptically to the numerous contributions calling for the supplanting of elections by sortition. While lottocracy is proposed as a solution to the flaws of electoral democracy — notably, corruption and violent partisanship — this response focuses on a single theoretical issue: the logic of chance or randomness, which, according to its proponents, should rid politics of corruption and relieve representation of partisanship so as to ultimately prevent (...) the formation of a ruling class separate from the rest of society. The problem with the solution, according to this essay, is that, however useful in many ways, the lottery system of lawmaking is not democratic. (shrink)

This paper looks at Alexander Guerrero’s epistemic case for ‘lottocracy’, or government by randomly selected citizen assemblies. It argues that Guerrero fails to show that citizen expertise is more likely to be elicited and brought to bear on democratic politics if we replace elections with random selection. However, randomly selected citizen assemblies can be valuable deliberative and participative additions to elected and appointed institutions even when citizens are not bearers of special knowledge or virtue individually or collectively.

Discusses who should decide the result of legal trials, focusing on the jury system.