‘May you live in interesting times’ is both an ancient Chinese curse and an accurate description of current politics. Despite often being at opposite ends of the policy scale, lottocrats and charismatic populists share the same perspective on ‘representation as embodiment’, as illustrated in this crude mash-up of the frontispiece to Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651 m/s drawing). Both camps (while often disagreeing on policy matters) claim that the Mortall God is an emergent property of popular sovereignty. Lafont and Urbinati (2024) equate lottocracy with populism: populism has an unaccountable leader who is supposed to ‘embody’ the nation; lottocracy has an unaccountable assembly that is supposed to ‘embody’ the nation.
Whether you focus on the sovereign, or its constitutive parts depends on whether you use a wide-angle or microscope lens (the tally of individuals forming the body of the sovereign is close to the minimum for a statistically-representative sample). Just as the orientation of the figures that constituted Leviathan switched 180 degrees between the original manuscript drawing and the engraved title page (published a few months later), most observers of the 47 th President’s electoral campaign predicted that populist rhetoric would be replaced by the oligarchic protection of elite interests once Trump’s feet were securely under the desk in the Oval Office. However, in the words of the Daily Telegraph, ‘Trump’s billionaire backers are suffering a heavy dose of buyer’s remorse’, hedge fund titan Bill Ackman protesting that ‘this is not what we voted for’. The rich‘n’powerful may have voted for tax cuts and deregulation, but hadn’t predicted the Wall Street carnage. Meanwhile Main Street (as depicted in J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy) appears to be holding firm in the hope that jobs will be repatriated.
If so, then the necessary connection between election and oligarchy (a common trope on this forum) should be called into question. Is it really the case that citizens’ conventions on (say) climate change are better aligned to public opinion than elected politicians (supposedly in hock to the hydrocarbon lobby)? If the latter is true, then UK lobbyists aren’t very good at their job, and some might argue that small voluntary citizens’ assemblies just empower a cultural, rather than socio-economic, elite.
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Equality by lot 
Sutherland,
Had Lafont and Urbinati paid attention to Mansbridge and Macedo, “Populism and Democratic Theory” (2019) they could have saved us the tedium of their rendition of the age-old well-worn elitist maneuver of equating democracy with tyranny.
https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-lawsocsci-101518-042843
As for the supposed disappointments of some of Trump’s rich backers of his exploits to date: Buyer’s remorse is a well known phenomenon. One is not always perfectly happy with one’s purchases. What of it? Are you really trying to assert that Trump has spent the first 80 days of his second administration working hard toward improving the well-being of the average American?! Would you care to provide a few notable examples of these efforts?
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I have no expertise in US current affairs, I’m only reflecting the reportage of MSM pundits.
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I think the challenge that electeds are not subservient to the wealthy interests that install them there is one that deserves being addressed.
I regularly argue that elections result in a legislature that is dominated by the interests of the people who help them get elected and stay elected. This is a little different than just saying politicians are corruptible by money or the promise of a sinecure. If it’s true that it’s common for elected people to not be beholden to their backers, then a major criticism I have of elections is not valid.
I guess I would say that the general tendency of elected is to stay elected/please their wealthy interests that get them elected and that is exception for them to not do so. What would those exceptions be? I think it’s probably something like a rare cop who just won’t be bribed or an evil genius who has manipulated his way into power and does whatever his pleases. Both instances, while being featured regularly in tv and movies, are rare and generally only arise when society is already in desperation.
In the instance of Trump, it sure feels the right was just like “drain the swamps” at all costs and now they’re paying the price for installing someone willing to buck the norms and be uncontrollable. Maybe. I don’t really keep up with day to day politics and only hear about DOGE and the tariffs all second hand.
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Max Clark> I think the challenge that electeds are not subservient to the wealthy interests that install them there is one that deserves being addressed.
Yes. Correct me if I’m wrong, but (with the exception of those seeking to hedge their bets) most of the big donations went to Kamala Harris. And also bear in mind that Elon Musk’s $2 million bung in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election ended in failure. (I’m amused that his original proposal was to select the beneficiaries by lot).
I agree with Max that there is no clear linear relationship between money and elected politicians (especially in countries like the UK that have low campaign finance limits). Most political commentators argue that the Labour Government is in hock to trade union/environmentalist, rather than plutocratic, interests. Elites come in a variety of different shapes and sizes and the Pareto/Mosca/Michels unified elite theory is long past its sell-by date.
As to what motivates Trump, it’s likely a combination of megalomania, messianism and (dare I say it) a genuine wish to further the (perceived) interests of his supporters. Whether the policies of his administration achieve any of that is an entirely different matter.
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The claim the Labour Government is in hock to environmentalists or the unions would come as a surprise to environmentalists and trades unionists! The more common accusation from the left, at least, is that they’re in hock to the gambling industry, private healthcare, and the various other corporate donors who have so generously lavished them with freebies.
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Oliver,
Labour’s pro-gambling approach has long puzzled me, but ‘investment’ in the NHS is at an all-time high and support for (UK) net zero in business and industrial circles is primarily lukewarm greenwash. But I guess we should avoid going down the rabbit hole of debate on policy specifics as our focus should be on structural considerations. This is from today’s Sunday Times:
“Trump is a highly effective populist. Populists lie and dissemble and exaggerate. They are often corrupt and self-serving. But they can also play a valuable role by exposing cant and double standards. They identify elite hypocrisies and use them to cultivate popular anger and frustration.”
Cristina and Nadia’s point is the similarity between populist and lottocratic rhetoric.
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> similarity between populist and lottocratic rhetoric
In fact “lottocrats”, personified notably by Alex Guerrero but it would be hard to find an exception to this rule, bend over backwards in order to downplay populist ideas (“the people in a morally charged battle against the elites”) , if not to avoid them altogether.
https://equalitybylot.com/2024/12/17/a-review-of-lottocracy-in-the-journal-of-sortition/
Of course, Lafont’s and Urbinati’s handwringing is pure pretense. The issue here is not the lottocratic rhetoric, but the reality of sortition. Sortition, regardless of the polite rhetoric the lottocrats keep wrapping it in, may very well turn out to be an effective tool by the people in their struggle against the elite. Thus, it is to be denigrated and resisted. The rest is sophistry.
https://equalitybylot.com/2024/05/04/lafont-argues-that-normal-people-cannot-be-trusted-with-power/
https://equalitybylot.com/2022/08/06/urgency-and-hypocrisy/
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Yoram,
Bear in mind the topic of this post is *rhetoric* — the observation that lottocrats and populists use the same linguistic tropes. “The people in a morally charged battle against the elites” could be from a wide variety of EbL comments as well as the MAGA copybook (and Machiavelli).
>Sortition . . . may very well turn out to be an effective tool by the people in their struggle against the elite.
So you concur on the substantive issue as well (although, unlike populists, you still insist on using the anachronistic singular case).
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> “The people in a morally charged battle against the elites” could be from a wide variety of EbL comments as well as the MAGA copybook
Indeed. And if this were what L&U were referring to when they talk about populism, then all would be well. But of course they don’t, because this understanding of populism does not carry the negative baggage that they want it to carry. They need to attach tyrannical, Facsistic attributes to populism and to claim that sortition advocates (“lottocrats”) also advocate for those.
L&U’s complaint about the rhetoric of “embodiment” is apparently so important that you singled it out in the title of this post? Where is the EbL, MAGA or lottocratic rhetoric about that?
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Sortititionists (like me) also use the language of embodiment — my preference being the Burkean argument for “virtual” representation. What differentiates sortitionists from both lottocrats and populists is that we advocate a mixed constitution, in which descriptive representation has a part to play (alongside election and appointment). Note that this is not just the precautionary principle, we believe that large-scale democracy without elections is impossible.
I think Nadia and Cristina are also sympathetic to such an approach. Note also that “rhetoric” is a neutral term — the original readers of Leviathan would not have seen anything tyrannical in the frontispiece illustration. I haven’t read The Lottocratic Mentality but would be surprised if it suggested there was anything fascistic about lottocracy.
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Keith,
Your use of ‘sortitionists’ vs. ‘lottocrats’ is interesting – my feeling is that your camp won’t be able to claim the ‘sortitionist’ title unmodified, given that the lottocrats (along with unclassified others) would call themselves the same. ‘Mixed sortitionism’ would probably be the best fit. It’s a heartening, though, that the intellectual popularity of sortition has reached the point where we can start talking about camps in this sense, rather than individual people with offbeat political proposals!
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Agree! I stole the distinction from a paper submitted recently to JoS.
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Do Lafont and Urbinati engage with your and Alex’s superminority proposal in their book?
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Having read the introduction to The Lottocratic Mentality (all I could find free online!), it appears they are not as sympathetic to your model as you hope. It also appears, going by the introduction at least, that they fundamentally don’t understand how random sampling works, and seem to be basing a large part of their critique on the belief that a stratified sample can only be relied on to resemble the population along the dimensions of stratification, as well as making a number of other crucially flawed arguments. I may get hold of the book and write a critical review – I’d be happy to do it for the JoS, if you fancy buying me a copy!
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Oliver
To date I think your JoS paper is alone in taking Alex and my ideas seriously. Neither of us would consider ourselves lottocrats as we don’t argue that ‘allotted assemblies should be set up to “solve problems” free from electoral competition’. Superminority is fundamentally an alteration of the electoral algorithm (alongside decision juries). OK, the latter could be described as “lottocratic”, but their large size and quasi-mandatory participation makes them no different in practice from the whole citizen body (absent metaphysical considerations of volunté). We are vehemently opposed to the many being ruled by the (aleatory) few. I also agree with L&U’s grounding of the argument in Pitkin’s analysis of representation (something I’ve been banging on about for years on this forum). That’s why we argue (contra the lottocrats) that sortition should have no role to play in policy formation/advocacy. I don’t think L&U address Superminority, but we don’t fit into their tripartite analysis of deliberative-democracy inspired sortition proposals as we have inverted the citizen assembly model by arguing for decision making by silent juries. This is the exact opposite of L&U’s revival of the Habermasian argument for allotted deliberation in civil society, which would provide even more power to the chattering classes.
Gil is doing an extended review of The Lottocratic Mentality in the next issue of JoS. Perhaps it wouldn’t be out of place to have one on this forum? (although it would make for a long post). OUP have a page where reviewers can request a pdf of a book for review. https://global.oup.com/academic/press/review-uk/?cc=gb&lang=en&
PS I think L&U are right in their critique of the representativeness of small voluntary stratified samples.
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Peter Stone’s (forthcoming) JoS review of The Keys to Democracy, highlights the adoption of the same rhetoric in both lottocracy and populism:
“There is more than a hint of populism in the suggestion that contemporary society divides into the ‘elite’ and (by implication) ‘the people’, with democracy requiring the transfer of power from the former to the latter.”
This analysis is common both to MAGA populists and the 1%-99% distinction made on this forum and elsewhere. Peter also mentions Marx’s distinction between ‘a class in itself’ and ‘a class for itself’, pointing out that the former does not of necessity lead to the latter.
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Had Yoran Gat paid attention to Urbinati’s articles and books, published before Mansbridge and Macedo’s, which quote them (precisely about the distinction between populism as a movement and populism in power), he could have saved us from the tedium of his ignorance. He would have also saved us from his violent language, which is unworthy of an academic discussion site. The poor guy identifies democracy with lottocracy by metaphysical assumption to conclude that any form of selection based on a human decision is tyranny. Bad scholarship.
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I forgot to write the name of the author of the answer to Yoran Gat — Nadia Urbinati
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I seem to have offended Nadia Urbinati with my “violent language” and “bad scholarship”.
I cannot find it in me to apologize. Anyone who presents a de facto defense of the status quo is hardly in a position to blame anyone else of being violent. Anyone who writes the condescending clichés that appear in the Introduction to “The Lottocratic Mentality”, (such as the talk about “the populist conception of representation as embodiment”) is hardly in a position to blame anyone else for bad scholarship.
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Yoram,
If I were a conspiracy theorist I would conclude that you were a fifth columnist, parachuted in to strangle the sortition movement at birth. It’s hard to find a better explanation for your track record in driving people away from this forum. (Your rudeness to Nadia is mild in comparison to the insults you have hurled at me, but that’s water off a duck’s back.)
>the populist conception of representation as embodiment
This is the view that the charismatic leader “embodies” the nation (depicted in the illustration to this post) and most political scientists would claim that it is self-evidently true, generally citing the words of the leader themselves (Peron, Hitler, Mao, Trump or whoever). Why is that a “condescending cliché”?
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It is unfortunate that some people are so thin skinned that they consider criticism of their work as “hurling insults”.
> This is the view that the charismatic leader “embodies” the nation
Thank you for again condescendingly explaining this cliché to me.
Now, again, could you be troubled to find a few references to the idea that an allotted body “embodies the nation” either on EbL or in any “lottocratic” literature? Or is it sufficient to make the claim that this idea is part of the “lottocratic mindset” and no evidence needs to be provided?
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“lottocracy has an . . . assembly that is supposed to ‘embody’ the nation.” [from the original post].
That’s what “descriptive” representation means (you really should read Pitkin). See, for example, the oft-cited passage from A Citizen Legislature:
“On average about 50% women; 12% blacks; 6% Latinos; 25% blue-collar workers; 10% unemployed persons; two doctors or dentists; one school administrator; two accountants; one real estate agent; eight teachers; one scientist; four bookkeepers; nine food service workers; one childcare worker; three carpenters; four farm laborers; thee auto mechanics; one fire fighter; one computer specialist; and a Buddhist.” (Callenbach & Phillips, 2008, pp. 29-31)
And nobody minds being criticized, so long as the language is temperate and the target is the work, not the author. Perhaps you should also read Toby Young’s memoir How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. You should also ask yourself why it is that sortition scholars don’t frequent this blog (one told me yesterday “I ventured there once and will never go back”).
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> That’s what “descriptive” representation means
Really? So why then don’t L&U use the term “represent the population descriptively” rather than “embody the nation”? And are you really saying that “the charismatic leader is descriptively representative of the nation”? You can’t even keep your arguments coherent.
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Both are examples of representation by embodiment, although only lottocracy presupposes descriptive representation. My post was on the rhetorical commonalities, not the differences.
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Other than your (and L&U’s) assertions, what associates sortition with embodiment? A dozen responses into this thread, you have yet to give a single example, let alone a consistent record, of sortition advocates (or even of MAGA people, BTW) mentioning “embodiment of the nation”. Maybe you can find some examples in L&U’s work? Or didn’t they bother backing up their claims with any evidence either?
Your entire line of argument is pure manipulation, which itself is of course an attribute of Fascism (and electoralism).
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Even if the word is not used, the democratic justification of a descriptively-representative assembly is that it embodies the target population (that it “stands” for). Standing for (Pitkin’s term) and embodying are synonymous.
If you continue to use the abusive language of your second paragraph then I (like the all other scholars you have maligned) will not bother to reply.
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> stands for
So now it’s not “embodiment”, it’s “stands for”. Just more manipulative word games. An allotted body “stands for” the population only in the sense that it makes decisions for it. Just like any other decision making body.
As always, I call things as I see them. If you find me pointing out your manipulative argumentation “abusive”, consider avoiding such tactics in the future.
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>An allotted body “stands for” the population only in the sense that it makes decisions for it.
To understand the distinction between “standing for” and “acting for” you need to read Pitkin (it’s not just a “manipulative word game”). If you’re not prepared to do the groundwork, then there’s nothing to debate.
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Yes – no doubt the it is by reading the sacred writings of Pitkin that one achieves the illumination that allows one to make sense of the incoherent, evidence-free claims you are presenting.
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Yoram,
Pitkin derived the standing for / acting for distinction from a paper presented at the 1960 Aristotelian Society symposium ‘How Can One Person Represent Another’. The authors argued that a body that ‘describes’ (embodies) a target population may or may not act in its interests, and that an agent authorised by election or appointment may or may not act in the interests of those that appointed him. You seem to accept the latter, in that you claim that any form of government is democratic so long as the citizenry believe that it is acting in its interests, but dismiss the former with a sarcastic quip. By all means take issue with the distinction, but nobody will engage with you if you haven’t even bothered to read the literature.
References
Griffiths, A.P, & Wollheim, R. (1960) How Can One Person Represent Another? Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, 34, 187-224.
Pitkin, H.F. (1967) The Concept of Representation, University of California Press.
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the
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*** Hobbes wished a political system where a singular or collective person rules absolutely, and the frontispice of Leviathan links that to the embodiment of the community. We know Hobbes was for the absolute monarchy, and he did not like the ancient democracy (taking his reasons in the classical tradition). But the sovereign dêmos was among the various kinds of sovereign he considered. The frontispice picture to Hobbes’ Leviathan could represent the Athenian assembly, not only the British absolute king.
*** The embodiment by a king is a “synthetic” one, the embodiment by Assembly or Juries is a “descriptive” one. In a democracy the members of an elite do not have specific collective power as in oligarchizing systems, but they are members of Assembly and Juries.
*** An elected representative parliament cannot easily embody the civic community, because it is not descriptive, as everybody knows (and cannot be, along the “principle of distinction). A president is not descriptive, clearly, and if he elected after a very hot and divisive electoral fight he cannot be synthetic of the community as a king can pretend to be. But an elected president of the populist kind can pretend to the embodiment, a “ synthetic” one, of the resentful majority against the elites (and eventually other minority sections). This embodiment is different of the Assembly or Juries embodying (by descriptive representation) the entire community, or of the king (or the king with the queen), hereditary or allotted, but anyway chosen without conflict, who can pretend to be a synthetic embodiment of the entire community.
*** The frontispiece to Hobbes Leviathan may correspond to a democratic system or to a monarchic one, not to an electoralist one – including with a populist leader.
André Sauzeau
PS There was in democratic Athens a king (allotted) and a queen (his wife) who embodied the City in front of the gods. The Queen married the god Dionysos when he came to the City on the great festival of Anthesteria (we don’t know the rites, secret ones). This democratic king (with a role about religious matters) was clearly the heir of a prehistoric king-monarch, and with his wife he embodied in a synthetic way the City, including its female half.
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Andre:> The embodiment by a king is a “synthetic” one, the embodiment by Assembly or Juries is a “descriptive” one
True. Another way of expressing this distinction is that “there are only two ways that something may represent something else: either metaphorically, where not-A stands for A, or synecdochically, where a part of A stands for A” (Ankersmit, 2019). This would suggest that Hobbes’s king is a metaphorical representative (symbolic in Pitkin’s terminology), whereas the assembly/jury is synecdochical:
“Synecdochical representatives are undifferentiated parts of the wholes they represent and serve as representatives in virtue of their essential similarity to the represented rather than any perceived or actual difference from them. In the performance of political roles, synecdochical representatives and those they represent are actually interchangeable. Any member of the whole (or almost any, given minimum age requirements in some ancient Greek cases) can stand in for any other. Ancient Greek democratic councillors, judges and assembly-goers were all synecdochical representatives.” (Cammack, 2021, p. 575)
The populist leader can only pretend to synthetic representation, as she was only selected by a part of the community. As to which form of representation best “acts for” (in the interests of) the community is an entirely different matter, as there is no necessary connection between descriptive representation and the active representation of interests (Griffiths & Wolheim, 1960, p. 190).
The mistake lottocrats make is to assume that a body that “describes” the community will, of necessity, act in its interests. And of course the converse is also true — there is no reason why a populist leader should not claim to act in the (perceived) interests of the majority of the community.
References
========
Ankersmit, F. (2019) Synecdochical and metaphorical political representation: Then and now, in Creating Political Presence: The New Politics of Democratic Representation, ed. D. Castiglione and J. Pollak, Chicago: Chicago University Press, pp. 231-53.
Cammack, D. (2021) Representation in ancient Greek democracy, History of Political Thought, XLII (4).
Griffiths, A. P., & Wollheim, R. (1960). How can one person represent another? Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, 34, 187-224.
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*** Griffiths & Wolheim 1960 claim that descriptive representation is not always good for the interests of the represented, because their preferences will not always correspond to their interests, by lack of rationality by example. They say it will not be a good thing if , in the ruling body, there is the same proportion of lunatics than in the whole community, not good even for the interests of lunatics.
*** True, if the ruling body mirrors the citizenry, it will include the same proôrtion of lunatics, of paranoiacs, of sociopaths etc than the citizenry itself. No less. But, likewise, no more. Whereas a process of selection may, on a systemic way or under some circonstances, heighten the proportion of some of these classes of people. The descriptive representation is the less dangerous one.
André Sauzeau
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Andre, it would certainly be less dangerous so long as the sample is truly descriptive and this, IMO, requires quasi-mandatory participation. And the other consideration is whether the group can maintain its descriptive accuracy once it undertakes speech acts. In Hanna Pitkin’s words:
“If the contemplated action is voting, then presumably (but not obviously) it means that the [descriptively-mandated] representative must vote as a majority of his constituents would. But any activities other than voting are less easy to deal with. Is he really literally to deliberate as if he were several hundred thousand people? To bargain that way? To speak that way? And if not that way, then how?” (Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (1967), pp. 144-145)
To choose an illustration closer to home, I don’t know the total number of readers of this forum but only a tiny minority participate in speech acts (via posting comments) and there is no way to know if this active minority accurately “describes” the full membership. With electoral representation you get (more or less) what you vote for — choose a sociopath and you get sociopathy. And if the representative claim of the sociopath aligns with the (perceived) interests of the represented, they may well prefer that to leaving it to chance. For some reason Yoram accepts that logic for any form of governance other than “electoralism”, where he claims a divergence of interests is inevitable.
However the votes of a large jury convened by quasi-mandatory sortition will accurately represent the target population by virtue of the Law of Large Numbers, as no speech acts are involved, and that would be a genuine constraint on sociopathy. This would suggest that sortition would be better viewed under the rubric of plebian republicanism than “deliberative” democracy: see https://www.imprint.co.uk/republicanism-hub/
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