Lottocracy: For and Against

Abstract

This article reviews two contrasting books on lottocracy that came out in 2024 – Alexander Guerrero's, Lottocracy: Democracy Without Elections and Cristina Lafont and Nadia Urbinati's The Lottocratic Mentality; Defending Democracy Against Lottocracy. Both are valuable additions to contemporary democratic theory's increasingly lively debates about the best way to conceptualise and institutionalise representative democracy. The review highlights the innovations that Guerrero brings to the presentation of lottocracy, and their implications for executive as well as legislative government, but questions his attachment to microcosmic representation as a regulative political ideal. Although sympathetic to Lafont and Urbinati's critique of lottocracy, it casts doubt on their claim that lottocrats must confuse democracy and technocracy and require ‘blind deference’ to the decisions of randomly selected assemblies. It also questions their confidence that we can readily distinguish the ‘auxiliary’ non-legislative forms of citizen assembly, which they favour, from the ‘lottocratic mentality’ they reject.