What Would Happen If Politicians Were Replaced by Randomly Selected Citizens
In a timely TED-Ed lesson, written by Michael Vasquez and animated by Avi Ofer, narrator Addison Anderson explains what might happen if politicians were replaced with people who were selected at random. This lottery-based system, now known as a lottocracy, was first used in ancient Athens and employed sortition to ensure electoral fairness.
Starting at age 30, citizens could place a token with their name into an allotment machine. These machines appointed citizens to government positions through a process designed to ensure randomness and prevent fraud. Before getting the job, chosen candidates underwent a public examination to investigate their character, and those that passed would typically serve for a single year. …This system was called sortition, and its goal was to promote political equality.
However, as with any system, there were also quite a number of hypocritical drawbacks to sortition.
Athenian sortition excluded women, foreign-born residents, and enslaved peoples. And, as philosophers like Plato and Aristotle pointed out, political decision-making requires expertise, a quality that’s difficult to develop in short appointments, and can’t be guaranteed by random selection.But broadly, this lottery-based system had strong public support. It was the dominant form of democracy during Athens’ Golden Age,
The lesson also talks about the work of Alex Guerrero, a philosophy professor at Rutgers University, who believes that a lottocracy could be the answer to partisanship in modern US politics.
Rather than relying on one decision-making body for every issue, multiple assemblies, each dedicated to a specific policy area. These single-issue, lottery-selected legislatures, or SILLs, are made up of hundreds of randomly chosen citizens who get trained in their assembly’s topic area by experts and advocates. Then, after consulting with the public to get their perspective, the members of a SILL draft and vote on topic-specific policies. This system extends all the way to the top, distributing even the powers of the presidency across a network lottery-filled Executive Assemblies and the administrative officials they appoint.
Some see it as a great tool for equalizing representation, preventing corruption, and ensuring subject matter competence.
Advocates of lottocracy believe it could address three of the biggest problems facing modern democracies. First, unequal representation. Since successful election campaigns require money and influence, many elected officials are much wealthier than half of US Congress members were millionaires. Problem two: most candidates rely on donations from individuals, corporations, and special interest groups who may try to influence their policies….The third problem is a lack of policy making competence.
