Allocracy: A Word for a Time That Has Come

Posted on March 14, 2026 by Wayne Liebman

“Everybody wants to have a hand in a great discovery. All I will do is to give a hint or two as to names.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes, in a letter coining the word anesthesia, November 21, 1846

The assembly ended, a few delegates lingered. They’d spent four days deliberating on the Los Angeles City Charter. Real people, chosen by lot, wrestling with real questions about how their city should work. Now they wanted to stay involved. One of them asked, simply: what do you call this? She didn’t just mean the assembly. She meant something larger.

It stopped me cold. We’d just completed the first charter reform assembly in the United States. Los Angeles: four million people, the largest American city ever to host such a body, had given ordinary residents an official voice in rewriting the rules of their own government. A small group of voluteers I’m part of spent years building Public Democracy LA (PDLA) into an organization that could help make something like this happen, educating, organizing, strategizing, advocating, recruiting, training. Then the charter issue dropped in our lap, and RewriteLA, a new coalition, formed to generate momentum for an assembly on charter reform. PDLA ran two charter mini-assemblies (December 2025 and January 2026) and the full assembly followed in February–March. Four days across two weekends, twenty-six hours of deliberation, moderated by Healthy Democracy, with an assist from PDLA. A landmark.

And we still didn’t have a word for it.

This matters more now than it did five years ago, because the movement, well-established internationally, is finally moving in the United States—the democracy most in peril. Assemblies are mushrooming across the U.S.: Petaluma, Deschutes, Montrose, Boulder, Fort Collins, L.A., Culver City, Decatur, Akron, Raleigh, several in Connecticut, and elsewhere. The infrastructure is being built. The model is proven. Healthy Democracy, F.I.D.E North America, Of By For, Sortition USA, PDLA, PAD, Unify America, The Assembly Project, Hannah Arendt Center at Bard, YOUnify, COCAP, CADA, NCL, CNDP and a growing network of practitioners and activists are carrying the work into new cities and new contexts. What was once a fringe idea entertained by political theorists and ignored by everyone else, is becoming something practitioners can point to. We did it. Here are the participants. Here are the recommendations. Here is what democracy looks like when you give it room to breathe.

And yet we keep tripping over the name.

Those of us in this community have made a kind of peace with sortition. We know what it means. We know its history, its mechanism, its logic. But it names only lottery and not the system of governance lottery makes possible. It says nothing about deliberation, or representation, or the political body that emerges. Ask a hundred educated people what sortition means and perhaps five will know. Deliberative democracy is better, as is civic assembly and its variants, but they’re both two words, and the crucial one, naming the selection mechanism that distinguishes them from every other form of civic engagement, disappears entirely. Neither does what democracy does. Neither conjures a whole system in a single breath.

I am an anesthesiologist. My specialty has a word because Oliver Wendell Holmes decided it needed one. Weeks after Morton’s first public demonstration using ether at Massachusetts General, Holmes wrote him a letter. The procedure had a name, etherization, but it was clumsy, and it focused on the agent rather than the state. Holmes proposed anesthesia. He was a physician, a poet, and a Harvard professor, and he understood that a discovery without a proper name was a discovery that couldn’t fully travel. His word stuck. It has been spoken, as he predicted, by the tongues of every civilized race.

I am aware it takes chutzpah to coin a word. Holmes had the advantage of being Oliver Wendell Holmes. I have the advantage of having been in the room. Here, then, is my hint as to names.

The word is allocracy. Rhymes with democracy.

The derivation is clean. Allocracy comes from the verb to allot, to assign by lot or chance, combined with the Greek kratia, meaning rule or power. Allot traces back through Old French to a Germanic root that also gives us lottery. The word describes the mechanism exactly: political power distributed by lot, to citizens drawn at random from the population at large. There is a secondary resonance. The prefix allo in Greek means other: rule by others, by people outside the political class, by those who didn’t seek power and aren’t beholden to those who fund it. Accidental, perhaps. Apt, certainly.

The alternatives don’t work. Klērotocracy is etymologically rigorous and utterly unpronounceable. Lottocracy and sortocracy both echo autocracy. Disastrous near-misses, particularly in conversation. Allocracy sidesteps the problem. It sounds like democracy, which is correct, because it is a form of democracy. A deeper form, the Athenians might have argued.

You cannot build a movement around a term that requires a seminar to explain. Every minute spent translating vocabulary is a minute lost to persuasion. The work is accelerating. Reformers are watching what happened in Los Angeles and other cities around the world. Funders are paying attention. So are journalists. Legislators are beginning to ask questions. Everyday people are getting more and more curious about alternatives to elections. This is the moment, if there is one, to put a name on the thing we’ve been building. Let us define one new word and be done with it.

The delegate who asked me that question after the LA assembly deserved a better answer than I gave her. She’d spent four days doing the work: deliberating, listening, changing her mind, helping craft recommendations that went before the Charter Reform Commission. She wanted to carry that experience forward. She needed a word.

Allocracy. Government by allotted assembly. Try it. It fits.

Filed under: Applications, Proposals, Sortition | Tagged: bible, democracy, History, news, politics |

8 Responses

keithsutherland, on March 14, 2026 at 2:03 pm said:

>Allocracy = Government by allotted assembly.

Nicely argued Wayne — the name might well appeal to those possessed of a “lottocratic mentality”, less so to those of us who aren’t seeking to abolish elections and replace them with government by allotted assembly. Sortition, as you rightly point out, is a selection procedure (not a system of government), and so is more attractive to those of us who argue for a mixed constitution. There are no historical examples of government by allotted assembly, and it is hard to imagine how it could possibly work.

>Neither [kleritocracy, lottocracy] does what democracy does. Neither conjures a whole system in a single breath.

Yes, that’s why we don’t need a new word to describe a political system where the demos exercises kratos. Classical-era Athenians would not be happy to see their political arrangements (mis)described as governance by allotted assembly. Their overriding priority was to protect the assembly from domination by elites (which come in all manner of shapes and forms, not just the rich ‘n’ powerful). The next issue of the Journal of Sortition explores the power dynamics of citizens assemblies, and the degree to which citizens’ deliberations are influenced by the sponsors, organisers and moderators.

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Anonymous, on March 14, 2026 at 3:46 pm said:

Thank you, Keith. I’m not arguing that we should seek to abolish elections, only that a government by chance (a system where, in your words, demos exercises kratos) does in fact deserve a name. The word democracy means exactly that, and the problems is that most people conflate elections with democracy. So I do think we need a word that makes that distinction. (Talking theoretically, of course. Why would we ever want to actually replace our electocracy?)

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Wayne Liebman, on March 14, 2026 at 3:51 pm said:

Above was me (Wayne). Trouble logging in.

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keithsutherland, on March 14, 2026 at 4:04 pm said:

It’s certainly true that lottocrats believe that government by chance is synonymous with democracy. It’s also the case that most people conflate elections with democracy. But there is a via media — elected politicians proposing (and opposing) policy options with the final decision in the hands of large (500+) juries, appointed by quasi-mandatory sortition. Some of us claim this would be the modern analogue of 4th century lawmaking, and the Athenians were quite content to call this democracy. This has very little in common with citizens’ assemblies and deliberative democracy.

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keithsutherland, on March 15, 2026 at 2:09 pm said:

>The word describes the mechanism exactly: political power distributed by lot, to citizens drawn at random from the population at large.

Is it wise to focus on the random nature of the selection process, without any reference to its positive characteristics? Remember it’s an “ocracy” that you are proposing.

>There is a secondary resonance. The prefix allo in Greek means other: rule by others

That’s also a risky strategy, as it emphasises the fact that the overwhelming majority of citizens would have no say in their political arrangements (or choosing the “others”). The modest claim that sortition would improve the representative (and epistemic) potential of democracy would likely be more attractive than a word with ground-zero implications.

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Anonymous, on March 15, 2026 at 2:52 pm said:

Sorry… not a fan. There is a word, though I admit it is hard to reclaim. The Greeks invented a system that relied primarily on lottery selection and they coined a new word for it… democracy. Yes, “sortition” ios merely the tool, and can be used by an aristocracy as well, as it was in the Italian Republics. Since democracy has been redefined in modern times to mean an election system, we need to add a descriptor. Not a single word but ACCURATE… democracy by sortition. Your proposed name has a similar (though less severe) problem as Alex Guerrero’s word “lottocracy.” The “cracy” part of the word means power, and demos is ” the people” . So, allocracy seems to mean leaving power up to chance, rather than to the people. Lottocracy is even worse simply because people already know the root Lottery (while most people don’t know the root for alloted), which again seems to mean making decisions by flipping a coin, rather than by rational thought. Any such word using the suffix “cracy” sends a powerful messsage that it is an ALTERNATIVE to democracy. I urge you to drop allocracy.

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keithsutherland, on March 15, 2026 at 4:51 pm said:

Anon: >Any such word using the suffix “cracy” sends a powerful messsage that it is an ALTERNATIVE to democracy. I urge you to drop allocracy.

Agree with all your points, but would argue that lottery selection was only one aspect of Athenian democracy. In terms of modern usage, the introduction of sortition would be akin to the other metamorphoses of representative government Manin describes in his book.

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Wayne Liebman, on March 15, 2026 at 10:08 pm said:

I agree it will be hard to reclaim democracy, as its meaning has become so entangled with elections, to our peril. So to me it does seem necessary now to use words that specify how the people will rule. If by elections, then electocracy. And we all know where that has led. I’m simply saying rule by allotted assembly deserves its own word, to hold place on the spectrum. Someday we’ll sit down and figure out the proper balance, but what we’ve got now ain’t it.

Also, I’d suggest the focus on derivation is overly literal. A new word means what its coiner intends, and if the community adopts it, that’s what it will mean. The derivation needs to be plausible and evocative, not a perfect logical equation. The whole history of English word-formation bears this out. Manufacture literally means “made by hand.” Now it means industrial machine production, the opposite. Salary comes from sal, Latin for salt. Roman soldiers were paid in salt, but nobody argues salary literally means salt. Muscle comes from musculus, Latin for little mouse, because a flexing muscle resembles a mouse under skin. Vivid etymology, irrelevant to meaning. Words outgrow their roots. That’s not a bug, it’s how language works.

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