The Lottocratic Mentality Defending Democracy against Lottocracy

In recent years there has been great interest in new forms of citizen participation, such as citizens' assemblies or deliberative polls that involve ordinary citizens in political decision-making. Many see these innovations as the best solution to the current crisis of democracy. The most radical among them propose replacing elections with the random selection of ordinary citizens, transforming electoral democracy into a lottocracy. These developments are driven by a lottocratic mentality that is deeply transforming our understanding of democracy, political equality, representation, and more.

In The Lottocratic Mentality, Lafont and Urbinati focus on this way of thinking, which is flourishing in public debates, inspiring the organization of citizens' assemblies worldwide, and bridging democratic and nondemocratic regimes in the vision of a unified global order based on problem-solving allotted assemblies, free from electoral competition.

The authors' analysis shows that it amounts to a worrisome form of technopopulism that justifies conferring legislative power on randomly selected assemblies based on a mixture of populist and technocratic grounds. This lottocratic mentality legitimizes the anti-democratic idea that the many should be "ruled" by "the few" chosen by chance. Against this view, they show how lottery-based institutions could be used with the democratic aim of empowering the citizenry, but only if the lottocratic mentality is rejected.

Cristina Lafont, Harold H. and Virginia Anderson Professor of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, Northwestern University,Nadia Urbinati, Kyriakos Tsakopoulos Professor of Political Theory, Department of Political Science, Columbia University in the City of New York

Cristina Lafont is Harold H. and Virginia Anderson Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University, where she is the director of the Program in Critical Theory and co-director of the research group on Global Capitalism and Law. She has held the Spinoza Chair at the University of Amsterdam and has been a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin. She has also been a visiting professor at the University of Oviedo (Spain), the University Carlos III in Madrid, and the Universidad Autónoma de México. Cristina is editor-in-chief of the journal Constellations and is the recipient (with Alex Guerrero) of the 2022 Lebowitz Prize for Philosophical Achievement and Contribution.

Nadia Urbinati is Kyriakos Tsakopoulos Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University in New York. She was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton) and Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellow, University Center for Human Values (Princeton). She has been a visiting professor at Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa (Italy), Bocconi University, SciencesPo, and UNICAMP (Brazil). Nadia co-edited the academic journal Constellations, with Andrew Arato, and is a columnist for RAI television and some Italian newspapers, including Domani and La Repubblica.

AcknowledgmentsIntroductionI. The Rise of the Lottocratic Mentality1. The Lottery Revival2. Deliberative Democracy's Turn to Lottery-Based Institutions3. The Clash Between Electoral Democracy and Lottocracy: Three Options4. The Targets of Lottocracy RevisitedII. What's Wrong with the Lottocractic Mentality?5. Disempowering The People: The Lottocratic Reinterpretation Of Political Equality6. A Sample Embodying Everyone: A New Populist Conception of Representation7. The Technocratic Conception Of PoliticsIII. Lottery Without the Lottocratic Mentality8. The Democratic Alternative: Institutionalizing Minipublics to Empower the CitizenryConclusionReferencesIndex