Debate Primer: Lottocracy
At Political Union, we usually save the strange debate topics for the end of the quarter, when we’re burning out and desperate for some novelty. Not this time: our first debate of spring quarter will be on April 4th at 7pm in 1902 Sheridan Road. We’ll be debating whether the US should elect members of Congress by lottery, a governance system that you may have heard called “lottocracy” or “sortition.”
More likely than not, though, you haven’t heard it called anything. That’s because it’s an idea still in its nascent stage, percolating through the political philosophy academy and occasionally appearing on the more adventurous mainstream podcasts. As a result, this debate primer will have to be a bit different: there aren’t two neat sides to this issue to counterpose because one of them has hardly been developed.
So instead, let’s start with a definition of lottocracy, and how exactly we’re adapting it to our debate: lottocracy is the simple random sampling of political officials from the general population, with the intention of creating a governing class that is representative of its electorate. In other words, just like how you can create a representative sample of NU students by randomly choosing a hundred from the directory, proponents of lottocracy argue that you can do the same with Americans as whole - and that we’ll have better politics as a result.
This week, we’re constraining lottocracy to just the House of Representatives, and we’re adding the caveat that individuals selected by lottery can opt out of serving in Congress. Additionally, we’re assuming that lotteries would be done within existing congressional districts, rather than from the entire country.
Here’s some reading material that covers several angles of this novel policy idea:
A piece from Dylan Matthews in Vox laying out how sortition works, and some of the most prominent arguments in favor and against. If you read one article on the subject, make it this one [7 mins].
A lengthy interview in The Nation with a proponent of a form of lottocracy, and how this system of governance fits into conversations about declining trust in government and allegations of electoral interference. Note: the interviewee’s model of “Open Democracy” deviates from the one we’ll refer to on Monday night, but has enough in common in principle that it’s worth including here [12 mins].
An political theory paper arguing against lottocracy from the perspective that universal suffrage is a human right and that democracy as we know it better promotes political equality than allocation of political authority through lottery [quite long, but you’ll get the meat of the argument if you skip to the final subheading, “Representation by Lottery”].
Yes, there is a TED Talk about this; it’s from Brett Hennig, who runs the Sortition Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to switching our system of governance to lottocracy. While it would make me most happy if you spent an hour reading all the other materials in this primer, I’ll still be somewhat consoled if you watch this video [10 mins].
"US Capitol" by Mark Fischer is marked with CC BY-SA 2.0.
