Guerrero in Jacobin

Posted on December 12, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Alexander Guerrero’s book Lottocracy was published a bit more than a year ago. Guerrero discusses the book in a recent interview in Jacobin magazine. Jacobin has, by the way, offered sortition to its readers at least once before, back in 2018.

Interestingly, Guerrero’s argumentation is much more effective and to the point in the short interview format than it was in the book. While in the book supposed epistemic difficulties of well-meaning elected officials are played up in order to explain why elected government does not promote the general interest, in the interview the principal-agent problem faced by society regarding its decision makers is treated as a self-evident case of a conflict of interests where the agent is simply promoting their own interest at the expense of those of the principal. Applying to electoral systems the same straightforward understanding of the problem that is generally taken for granted when dealing with non-electoral systems makes for a much more convincing and effective argument.

Also interesting is the fact that in the short interview Guerrero finds room to mention Bernard Manin’s important book Principles of representative government, a reference which is sorely and inexplicably missing in Lottocracy. Guerrero now refers to Manin as explaining that elections were set up as a deliberately aristocratic mechanism. This is an important historical point, which (I believe) is also missing in Lottocracy. That said, Manin’s most important idea – his “pure theory of elections” – is still missing in Guerrero’s argumentation. This theory explains why elections must produce elite rule and thus can be expected to promote elite interests at the expense of the general interests, without having to resort to the standard popular ignorance argument which is problematic both as a matter of fact and as a matter of principle.

Finally, the fact that the interview skims quickly over Guerrero’s proposal for how sortition is to be used also benefits the presentation. This brevity leaves the stage for the democratic ideas behind the mechanism of sortition and does not obscure these ideas with Geurrero’s elaborate proposed set-up which aims to prevent the allotted citizens from going democratically “wild”.

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Books, Elections, History, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 2 Comments »

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 Comments »

Sortition is the only worthwhile democratic option

Posted on November 1, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Octave Larmagnac-Matheron writes in the French magazine Philosophie [Original in French. Below is an English version generated by Google Translate with my touch-ups]:

In one of his characteristically thought-provoking Facebook posts, the philosopher Valentin Husson wrote a few days ago: ‘When the world tips towards illiberal democracies and authoritarianism, political courage would dictate that we propose a radical democracy. The only worthwhile one would be sortition (as with lay juries).’ I readily agree with both the observation and the proposal.

Sortition is, I believe, one of the first political ideas I defended in my short life. I remember quite well how I first arrived at this idea, during a high school lesson on Athenian institutions, which offered an overview of the workings of this unique system where members of the legislative and judicial assemblies — the Boule and the Heliaia — were chosen by lot, using a machine called the kleroterion. I was surprised that we used the same word — democracy — for both this system of chance and our own, elective system. Discovering philosophy two years later, I came to the same conclusion. Aristotle wrote that “it is considered democratic for magistracies to be assigned by lot and oligarchic for them to be elective” (Politics). Centuries later, Enlightenment philosophers wholeheartedly agree. Montesquieu wrote: “Suffrage by lot is in the nature of democracy. Lot is a way of electing that offends no one; it leaves each citizen a reasonable hope of serving their country” (The Spirit of the Laws). Rousseau agreed: “The way of lot is more in the nature of democracy” (The Social Contract).

Intrigued by these short phrases, which didn’t seem to bother many people, I then embarked on further reading. Allow me to mention two works that particularly struck me at the time. First, Bernard Manin’s Principles of Representative Government (1995). The philosopher recounts the rise of an electoral system that conquered the world following the great revolutions and clearly explains the aristocratic character of this regime that usurped the name of democracy. Next came Jacques Rancière’s Hatred of Democracy (2005), whose impassioned prose undeniably sparked enthusiasm in my young alter ego. Democracy, Rancière emphasizes, is a scandal: “Democracy means first and foremost this: an anarchic ‘government’” — without any claim to distinction — “founded on nothing other than the absence of any right to govern. […] The scandal lies there: a scandal for distinguished people who cannot accept that their birth, their seniority, or their knowledge should have to bow to the law of fate.” Isn’t impartial chance the best option for every citizen to participate in the exercise of political power — a guarantee that this power will not be monopolized?
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Filed under: Athens, Books, Elections, History, Sortition | Leave a comment »

More Edmund Griffiths on sortition

Posted on October 8, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Edmund Griffiths, a long-time sortition advocate, has been pushing for sortition in the infighting-torn YourParty. It turns out he’s been writing a book called Sortition and Socialist Democracy to be published by Palgrave Macmillan. Griffiths also has a new article in the Morning Star discussing the sortition-related ongoings at YourParty, and in particular the fact that it turns out that the number of allotted delegates in the YourParty conference is going to be 13,000.

Your Party launch conference: the sortition of the 13,000

EDMUND GRIFFITHS makes a robust defence of sortition, the chosen method of picking attendees for the new left party’s inaugural conference from the membership at random, but sounds the alarm on the eye-watering number of suggested delegates

[A]n especially exciting plot twist [in the YourParty thriller] came in mid-September, with the announcement that delegates to the inaugural Your Party conference will be chosen by sortition.

This system — where members of decision-making bodies are picked at random — is most familiar from its use in ancient Athens and in a modern jury. The Athenians, indeed, seem to have regarded it as simple common sense that democracies choose their ruling bodies using a lottery: only oligarchies prefer to elect them.
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Filed under: Applications, Books, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Hallam: Sortition is democracy

Posted on September 20, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Roger Hallam, a co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, recently released from a year-long stay in jail where he was serving a sentence for criminal political activities, has been a sortition advoacate for some time. Hallam has a new forceful article in The New Stateman (and a new book). Unlike other authors, for Hallam, sortition is not an add-on. It is democracy. If memory serves, Hallam is the most high-profile consistent advocate for sortition to date.

Hallam starts by a full frontal assault on elections.

Voting isn’t democratic. We need sortition

Randomly selecting people to rule would be a hell of a lot better than holding elections

[V]oting and elections do not, and never have, produced rule by the people. What they produce is oligarchy – rule by the few. Don’t take my word for it. This was standard political knowledge from ancient times up to the French Revolution. What you got with voting and elections was a few people in charge – obviously! Because, as everyone who observes what actually happens knows, so-called electoral “democracies” are always controlled by the few. Sure, if you like voting and elections and oligarchies that’s fine. They have their pros and cons, but don’t delude yourself and others that you are a democrat. You are not.
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Filed under: Books, Elections, History, Press, Sortition | 5 Comments »

A predictable critique of Guerrero’s Lottocracy

Posted on August 23, 2025 by Yoram Gat

Niko Kolodny, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley has a lengthy piece in the Boston Review which reviews Alexander Guerrero’s Lottocracy. Unsurprisingly, Kolodny is not sympathetic to the idea of sortition. Predictably, Kolodny finds ample opportunities to criticize Guerroro’s “relentlessly thorough”, eclectic argumentation.

In particular, Kolodny effectively exploits Guerrero’s reliance on the supposed inability of the public to represent its own interests without proper guidance. For example:

Guerrero imagines that each SILL [single-issue, lottery-selected legislatures] would be guided in its deliberation by a poll of those few citizens who somehow are able to take a week off of work and other responsibilities to pay attention to the five day-long discussions of the final five proposals. Again, if the powerful can, in effect, buy off the general public to support a particular electoral party, then why can’t the powerful mobilize a (again, presumably quite small) group to pay attention to the review of proposals for the Water Access and Water Quality SILL and support what they favor? No one but the powerful, one worries, would be minding the store.

Kolodny’s argument above, as well as his other arguments (e.g., his assertion that people cannot be expected to accept offers in an allotted body), are standard. He goes so far as to inflict on his readers the electoralist dogma about how “[b]y choosing some political programs and parties over others, [voters] shape the political/ideological space within which the elected representatives must operate until the next election”. A formula he quotes from Cristina Lafont and Nadia Urbinati’s The Lottocratic Mentality: Defending Democracy Against Lottocracy.

Such arguments are easily refuted and have been refuted many times. However, Guerrero’s book is not up to the task. Instead, the book makes it easy for the opponents of sortition – or more to the point, for the opponents of democracy – to rehash the old superficial talking points and present them as “a splendid and convincing recent counterpoint to arguments for lottocracy”.

Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Press, Proposals, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Democracy and Truth

Posted on June 21, 2025 by Yoram Gat

In a recent article in The Catholic Herald Niall Gooch discusses some objections to sortition from the book Against sortition?. As he describes sortition, “[t]he idea is that involving “normal people” in such deliberation helps to spread power more widely and obtain broader perspectives”.

The contributors to the book set out various reservations about this idea, and various objections. Many of them have procedural concerns – for example, they believe that existing approaches don’t gain a wide enough spectrum of opinion, or that they are easily captured by special interests, or that they don’t really add anything new to a conventional elected legislature.

Others highlight the problems of accountability raised by citizens’ assemblies, or the way in which they dilute the legitimacy of existing bodies. But a few contributors are clearly trying to articulate something like the more fundamental problem identified by John Paul II, which we might sum up with this question: “Does involving lots more people in political decision making actually get you closer to the truth?”

Gooch refers his readers to, Evangelium Vitae, The Gospel of Life, a 1995 essay by Pope John Paul II. In it John Paul II writes:

Democracy cannot be idolized to the point of making it a substitute for morality or a panacea for immorality. Fundamentally, democracy is a “system” and as such is a means and not an end. Its “moral” value is not automatic, but depends on conformity to the moral law to which it, like every other form of human behaviour, must be subject: in other words, its morality depends on the morality of the ends which it pursues and of the means which it employs. If today we see an almost universal consensus with regard to the value of democracy, this is to be considered a positive “sign of the times”, as the Church’s Magisterium has frequently noted. But the value of democracy stands or falls with the values which it embodies and promotes. Of course, values such as the dignity of every human person, respect for inviolable and inalienable human rights, and the adoption of the “common good” as the end and criterion regulating political life are certainly fundamental and not to be ignored.
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Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Participation, Religion, Sortition | 4 Comments »

Choosing by lot and the politics without titles

Posted on May 4, 2025 by towardsautonomyblog

Yavor Tarinski

The man who wears the shoe knows best that it pinches and where it pinches. ~John Dewey [1]

One of the main pillars of contemporary oligarchies worldwide is the institution of elections. Every leader and government, regardless of how liberal or authoritarian, claims its ascendance to power through some kind of electoral process. Elections are considered as “the democratic means” per se – if a system is based on elections, then it supposedly is a “democracy”.

The supporters of this view see in electoral processes a means of sustaining popular sovereignty, while avoiding what they see as a danger of popular self-rule – i.e., rule by the incompetent. But as philosopher Jacques Rancière underlines, there is an “evil at once much more serious and much more probable than a government full of incompetents: government comprised of a certain competence, that of individuals skilled at taking power through cunning.”[2]

Electoral processes tend to nurture antagonism and competitiveness, rather than cooperation and dialogue. They give way to a certain anthropological type – the power-hungry political demagogue. Rather than concerned with resolving public issues and problems, it focuses on “winning” elections. The very essence of politics is radically altered in elections-based systems – with their content being emptied of any substantial deliberatory essence and replaced with a lifestylish approach that focuses on candidates – their ways of life, the tricks they pull on each other, etc.

Ultimately, the main agenda that drives the action of the electoral anthropological type is that of opinion polls. Candidates must learn what and when to say things that will be liked by the largest amount of people, so that they can get ahead in the race. The result is a type of craft where electoral competitors outbid each other, play dirty, and resort to all sort of tricks in order to win. This becomes the main occupation of people involved in electoral competitions for office. Because of this political scientist James S. Fishkin suggests:

Candidates do not wish to win the argument on the merits as much as they wish to win the election. If they can do so by distorting or manipulating the argument successfully, many of them are likely to do so. Representatives elected through such processes are looking ahead to the next election while in office.[3]

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Filed under: Books, Elections, Sortition, Theory | Tagged: , , | 4 Comments »

Representation as Embodiment

Posted on April 11, 2025 by keithsutherland

‘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.
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Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Sortition | 35 Comments »

True Representation Sketchbook—Sketches #1 and #2

Posted on March 26, 2025 by Ted Wachtel

Free Webinar: Lottocracy Versus House of Citizens: Contradictory or Compatible?

The Building a New Reality Foundation is featuring Brett Hennig and Alex Guerrero on April 1 at noon EDT (UTC-4) to present and discuss their ideas, and to respond to audience questions. An optional half hour small group discussion will follow the one-hour webinar. If the time is not good for you, register anyway because we will send all registrants a link to the recording.

Register Now!

The following written “sketches” about the work of BANR’s webinar guests supplement my True Representation (2020) book and illustrate examples of how True Representation might be used in practice.

Sketch 1: House of Citizens for the UK

I first saw a video of Brett Hennig delivering a brilliant 9-minute TEDx Talk entitled, “What if we replaced politicians with randomly selected people,” in which he talked about “sortition” replacing elections and bringing about the end of politicians.

There is a growing global interest in citizens’ assemblies, with members chosen randomly like a jury, who collectively study issues and provide recommendations to government.

Hennig helps organize single-issue citizens’ assemblies as a way of demonstrating the “wisdom of crowds” but his end goal is to replace elected legislators with citizens chosen by lottery, free from party politics.

He is co-director of the UK-based Sortition Foundation that in 2024 launched Project 858 — a campaign and petition drive calling for the replacement of the utterly undemocratic House of Lords with a randomly selected House of Citizens.

The 858.org.uk website explains:

858 years ago King Henry II shook things up by introducing juries. After eight centuries they’ve more than proven their worth as the backbone of the legal system and now it’s time to put ordinary people at the helm in politics too.
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Filed under: Academia, Books, History, meeting, Proposals, Sortition | 5 Comments »

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