Book Description

Democracy is in trouble--there is disagreement about what is going wrong and what we should do about it. Lottocracy 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 divisions 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. Policy complexity, citizen ignorance, elite capture and manipulation, algorithmically reinforced echo chambers, intensifying partisan division and distrust, and the dissolution of political community combine to render modern electoral democracies incapable of helping us solve the urgent problems we face. What should we do? Alexander Guerrero takes seriously the possibility that although electoral democracy has been better than all systems that have been tried, the basic mechanism at its core--the election--is broken, and unworkable under modern political conditions. However, Lottocracy moves past a Churchillian shrug ("the worst system, except for all the others"), introducing 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. Guerrero introduces and discusses lottocratic systems, their potential advantages, and potential concerns. The argument engages with foundational philosophical questions, considering how rights of political participation, political equality, political power, considerations of accountability and legitimacy, and the nature of democracy itself are illuminated and reconfigured once we move past the electoral representative framework.