Against Lottocracy
| Published date | 01 April 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885118783602 |
| Author | Lachlan Montgomery Umbers |
| Date | 01 April 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
EJPT
Article
Against Lottocracy
Lachlan Montgomery Umbers
Practical Justice Initiative, University of New South Wales,
Australia
Abstract
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 decision-making. Many of the most interesting among these involve
reliance on lotteries in one way or another – as a means of distributing the franchise,
selecting representatives, or making social choices. Advocates of these ‘lottocratic’
systems contend that they retain the egalitarian appeal of democracy, while promising
improved political outcomes. The aim of this article is to defend democracy (or, at least,
universal suffrage and majority rule) against the challenge posed by these proposals.
I argue, firstly, that lottocratic systems necessarily involve the establishment of
objectionable social and political inequalities in a way that democracies do not.
Secondly, I raise a number of doubts with respect to the purported instrumental
benefits of these proposals.
Keywords
Democracy, equality, fairness, lotteries, voting
Most political theorists believe that democratic systems, in which (at a minimum)
all adult citizens enjoy the right to vote, and decisions are made via the aggregation
of voters’ expressed preferences, constitute the sole legitimate form of government.
History, along with results from the social sciences, seems to vindicate the idea that
democracy delivers higher-quality outcomes than alternative means of making
political decisions (Christiano, 2011; Sen, 1999). Democracy is also widely thought
to constitute the best feasible expression of equal respect for persons in the political
domain (Beitz, 1989; Christiano, 2008; Kolodny, 2014). Yet real-world democracies
have been plagued by difficulties in recent times: corruption, low-quality decisions,
European Journal of Political Theory
2021, Vol. 20(2) 312–334
!The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885118783602
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Corresponding author:
Lachlan Montgomery Umbers, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Practical Justice Initiative, University of New
South Wales. Office 318, Morven Brown Building, University of New South Wales, Kensington, NSW, 2052,
Australia.
Email: lachlan.umbers@unsw.edu.au
elite bias, and so on. Perhaps as a result, a number of theorists have begun
to challenge the orthodoxy. Amongst the most interesting of these challenges are
those which have been issued by proponents of introducing random selection to
various stages of the political process. These proposals, it is argued, promise to
retain or improve upon the egalitarian appeal of conventional democracy, while
realising higher-quality outcomes.
I have no general argument to offer against the use of random selection in
politics. My goal, rather, is to defend the institutions of contemporary democ-
racy – specifically, institutional arrangements wherein all sufficiently competent
adult citizens have the right to vote, and decisions are made by the fair aggre-
gation of voters’ equally weighted expressed preferences, or by their elected
representatives – against the challenge posed by proponents of the following
three specific lottery-based proposals:
1
Lottery Voting: The abolition of aggregative decision-making in favour of a process in
which social choices are made by the random selection of a single vote from among
those cast.
2
Suffrage by Lottery: The abolition of universal suffrage in favour of the enfranchise-
ment of some randomly selected proper subset of the population.
3
Representation by Lottery: The abolition of both universal suffrage and aggregative
decision-making in favour of random selection as a means of selecting political
representatives.
4
The article proceeds as follows. The first section argues that the egalitarian argu-
ments in favour of these proposals rest upon implausible normative commitments,
and that the comparative egalitarian merits of democracy are generally superior.
The second section argues that the instrumental case for each of these proposals is,
at best, inconclusive. The third section briefly concludes.
Political Equality
The distribution of a good among a group of persons by fair lottery (i.e. a lottery in
which all outcomes are equiprobable) gives all group members an equal chance of
enjoying the good in question. The proposals under consideration here, each give
citizens equal chances of enjoying political power of various kinds – decisiveness
(lottery voting), political office (representation by lottery), or enfranchisement
(suffrage by lottery). The most common egalitarian arguments in favour of these
systems over democracy, then, are variants on the following:
Equal Chances Claim (ECC): Some lottery-based proposal satisfies the requirements
of political equality as well as, or better than, democracy because it affords citizens
equal chances for political power of some kind.
Umbers 313
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