Equality by lot

“Against Lottocracy” (PDF) is a 2018 paper by Lachlan Montgomery Umbers from the department of philosophy at the University of Western 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.

The paper is an attempt to formulate a reasoned (negative) response to proposals for instituting sortition-based government as a substitute to elections-based government, and specifically (as its name indicates) to Alexander Guerrero’s proposals. By doing so, the paper represents a significant step forward in the Anglophone academic discussion of sortition. In English-speaking academia proposals for setting up “citizen juries” – i.e., allotted, one-time, limited-purview decision making or (more often) advisory bodies – are discussed at length. So far, however, proposals for setting up sortition-based government were either ignored or summarily dismissed (“Nobody is going to support replacing Congress or Parliament with a randomly selected assembly,” as Helen Landemore put it). As it turns out, Umbers argues for the same reformist academic position. Umbers, however, does break some new ground by devoting his energies to making a detailed argument rather than simply taking sortition-based government off the table at the outset.

The paper deals with different proposals and approaches the issue of sortition from different angles, but in my opinion the most interesting section is the last one where Umbers addresses the instrumental case for representation by lottery:

The most important instrumental argument for representation by lottery is that it would mitigate elite bias. Two arguments to this effect have been presented. First, given the costs of running for election, democracies tend to disproportionately select for social and economic elites as officeholders. Selecting representatives randomly would eliminate this effect (McCormick, 2011: 170–188; Zakaras, 2010: 460–461). Second, elections afford social and economic elites opportunities to ‘capture’ – i.e. exert disproportionate influence over – politicians. These opportunities are numerous: manipulating pre-selection processes, manipulating candidates’ media presentation, campaign finance contributions, and so on. The elimination of elections would close off these avenues of influence (Guerrero, 2014). The end result, it is argued, should be decisions that attend more closely to the interests of the citizenry as a whole, rather than social elites.

Umbers’s retort is that

1. Electoral finance rules and mandatory voting can mitigate the elite advantage in electoral systems,
2. Government has to promote the interests of the elites due to their economic power,
3. Elites would able to lobby allotted government, and allotted government would be very susceptible to lobbying due to lack of experience.

Umbers also argues against the notion that allotted legislature would produce better deliberation. Umbers claims that evidence about the quality of deliberation in citizen juries cannot be applied to claims about legislative bodies. Because of their great political power legislative bodies, unlike citizen juries, are the target of outside intervention and are more likely to foster self-interested deliberation.

Finally, Umbers claims that elections serve some useful functions:

1. Elections “provide individuals with valuable opportunities for the exercise of those liberties necessary for political organisation – speech, thought, travel, and so on,” and thus, “[a]bolishing elections would diminish the role of these liberties in public life, potentially making it easier to curtail those liberties,”
2. they provide “a range of important opportunities for political participation”, and
3. they also create powerful incentives to “ascertain and address the concerns of the citizenry” and “to perform at least minimally competently to promote their chances of re-election,” while “[n]o such pressures obtain under representation by lottery.”

Filed under: Academia, Elections, Sortition |