Are Politics Broken? Rutgers Philosopher Proposes “Lottocracy”

As the Nov. 6 election approaches, do you sometimes feel our electoral system is broken and in need of replacement?

If so, you are not alone. In several articles, a free online course and a forthcoming book, Alexander Guerrero,  an associate professor of philosophy at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, lays out a plan for “lottocracy” – a new form of government in which adult citizens would be randomly selected to serve as lawmakers. 

Rutgers Today talks with Guerrero about how ending elections would free us from the tyranny of false campaign promises and wealthy special interests, and make government look more like a cross section of American society. He also proposes a smaller-scale version to solve intractable issues like climate change. 

Are you proposing that Americans shouldn’t vote?

No, not at all. While we have this electoral system, we should do what we can to choose the best representatives. We shouldn’t limit our political imaginations. There is a reason many Americans feel our system is broken. Representative democracy – like any political system – is a kind of technology, certainly better than anything that came before. Still, it is tied to an electoral system that creates and intensifies rifts in our communities. The designers of this technology, a group of men sitting in a room in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, had their own values, things they cared about, things they wanted the government to embody and to achieve. They couldn’t have dreamed of smartphones, the internet, space travel or global warming.  We should think about what we want our political system to do, where it is succeeding, where it is failing. We should think about innovation, imagination and new kinds of political systems, new forms of political technology.     

What do you see as the problems with our electoral system?

Having elections at the center of our political system creates four main problems. First, our elected officials are too easily captured by wealthy special interests. They are not truly accountable to the people who elect them. From defense spending to environmental regulation to the cost of health care, the policies we get are frequently those the relevant industries want. Second, elections create an undue focus on the short term. Officials care about what they can claim credit for between elections and largely ignore big issues – like climate change – that have a longer time horizon. Third, electoral dynamics reinforce political divisions. Voters are ignorant of policy issues and focus on the character drama, the horse race, the inspirational candidate. We identify with our candidate, reduce the other side to a caricature of their worst elements and shut out information we disagree with. Finally, elections lead to oligarchy rather than equal representation for all. The U.S. Congress is 80 percent male, 80 percent white and includes disproportionate numbers of millionaires, lawyers and businesspeople.  We lose out on much of what the rest of us have to offer—what we know, what we value, what we care about—by using elections.     

What is your vision for a “lottocracy”?

We would be better off using randomly chosen citizens, selected to serve on single-issue legislatures (each covering, say, transportation or education or agriculture), who would learn about the relevant issues in detail and engage with each other over an extended period of time to make policy decisions. Instead of a generalist legislature like Congress, we would have 30 single-issue legislatures, each with 300 randomly-chosen citizen legislators serving three-year terms.  A true random selection of citizens age 18 and up could be established using mechanisms like those used for jury selection. Those selected wouldn’t be required to serve, but a significant salary, the promise to accommodate family and work requirements, and the sense that service is a civic duty and honor should encourage them. Without elections, we would lose the sense that “our team” wins or loses. We wouldn’t have teams in the same way. Moving away from a generalist legislative process opens up places for us to identify issues on which we agree rather than having our attention concentrated on those few issues that most deeply divide us. Without campaign promises, political ads and re-elections, we could finally move beyond the capture and control of political institutions by wealthy corporate interests. This would truly return democratic control to the people.

Fascinating idea, but is it likely to happen?

Probably not in the near future. We shouldn’t start with the scale I just presented. Some of the worst horrors of the 20th century, such as the regimes of the Khmer Rouge, Stalin, Mao, Castro and others, resulted from political design projects gone terribly wrong. We should start with small experimental steps. The Netherlands and Canada have used assemblies of randomly chosen citizens to reform election law. Iceland and Ireland brought randomly chosen citizens into the process of constitutional reform. I suggest we use a similar approach for some of the most urgent issues we face today, especially climate change, for which any true progress has been impossible. We cannot afford to stand still. Let’s think beyond the limits of our current system.