Delannoi: Are you a lottocrat?

Posted on November 15, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Gil Delannoi’s opinion piece “Are you a lottocrat?” appears in the second issue of the Journal of Sortition.

Are ‘lottocracy’, ‘lottocratic’ indispensable, necessary, useful, superfluous, or pernicious words? These words already exist, and like most words ending in ‘cracy’ or ‘ism’, they are used in a pejorative, anxious, indifferent, descriptive, positive, or enthusiastic way.

To what category are these words supposed to belong? Political regimes. Among the various approaches Aristotle used in his typology of political regimes, it is true that his reflection included the typical selection procedure of each regime. He thought, at his time, that a typical or radical democracy would include the use of sortition, but it was only a more pronounced use among the other procedures used in a democratic regime. Typical does not necessarily mean dominant. Moreover, both by observing common usage and for the sake of clarity, he retained the criterion of the number of holders of sovereignty as the name of each regime.

We could break with this tradition, though this exciting exercise is rather pointless. If a procedure were to give its name to a regime:

Hereditocracy? Votocracy/Psephocracy? Lottocracy/Klerocracy? Why not Marketocracy? (combined with Bureaucracy in the EU). Bureaucracy is characteristic of regimes as soon as it is linked with another word: autocracy, oligarchy, one-party system, partitocracy or partycracy.

The full piece is at https://www.imprint.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Delannoi_PtP.pdf.

Filed under: Academia, Books, Sortition |

3 Responses

Anonymous, on November 15, 2025 at 11:52 am said:

Is this an unedited Google translation?

LikeLike
keithsutherland, on November 15, 2025 at 12:54 pm said:

Blimey, I didn’t think Gil’s English was that bad! The coining of all the ‘ocracies is precisely his point (a somewhat pointless exercise).

LikeLike
Yoram Gat, on November 17, 2025 at 4:57 pm said:

Here are my answers to Delannoi’s lottocratic quiz:

A – yes. Isn’t self-rule (being ruled by people like me) a pillar of democracy?

B – yes. Presumably “sociological representation” means statistical representation.

Γ – yes.

Δ – probably no – not quite sure what this means.

E – probably yes, presuming that “mediation” means having some elected or appointed group having decision making power.

Z – no. Allotted bodies tend to make better decisions (in the eyes of the public, or of the body’s own members in retrospect), but this is only a general tendency, not an unbreakable rule

H – yes. Allotted bodies are not sovreign entities.

Θ – no. Quite the contrary.

O – no. Again – quite the contrary.

Π – no. Disagreements between groups are the substance of democratic politics. The conflict between the elite and the people is substance of oligrachical politics.

Ρ – no. Who writes this nonsense?!

Σ – no. Referenda are generally useless (with some important exceptions), but are not inherently bad. The real question is who sets up the agenda for the referenda.

T – yes.

Y – yes.

Φ – nonsense statement. Sortition does not exclude the vast majority of citizens from decision making. If we are talking about having substantial weight in decision making, the vast majority never had it and never will – this is just a matter of arithmetic. If we are talking about having some say, then sortition gives citizens much more say than elections do.

X – no. Mass voting does not matter whether the public is informed or not. Once the agenda is set by the elite, the rest is theater.

Ψ – no.

Ω – yes.

LikeLike