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A
This is Philosophy Bytes with me, David
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B
Edmonds and me, Nigel Warburton.
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A
Philosophy Bytes is available at www.philosophybytes.com. democracy isn't faring too well at the moment. There's widespread distrust of politicians and the political system, sometimes with good reason. Alex Guerrero of Rutgers University has a radical solution. Let's scrap elections altogether. In their place, let's select our representatives at random from amongst the citizenry through a lottery system.
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B
Alex Guerrero, welcome to Philosophy Bites.
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C
Thank you so much for having me.
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B
The topic we're going to focus on is Lottocracy. What on earth is that?
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C
So a lot of different ideas. The basic one behind what I call Lottocracy is using random selection rather than elections to select our political representatives. That goes under the name Sortition. People talk about citizens assemblies. I defend the idea of litocracy as a full scale replacement. So no elections in any part of the system and just trying to build everything using randomly selected citizens.
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B
So the name comes from lots. Drawing lots.
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C
Absolutely, yes. I like that name better than Sortition. People don't really know what that is. Sounds kind of sordid. Sedition, sort of not as catchy. So government by use of lottery.
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B
So this is a selection of representatives by a random mechanism, is that right?
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C
Yeah. So using lotteries to select the political representatives. Lots of different ways of doing it. The way that I'm sort of interested in pursuing is thinking of it as a full replacement for a generalist legislature. So in the United States Congress legislates over everything. I think randomly chosen citizens, that might be a lot for them to be given all that power and have to learn about all those different issues. So I suggest using sort of 20 different single issue legislative bodies, but each one comprised of randomly selected citizens.
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B
And would this be compulsory? I mean, if your number comes up, is it like being called up for the army?
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C
Well, that's an important choice point. I end up arguing. No, I don't think it should be. I think it's hard to get people to do a good job if you're forcing them to be there. I do think we want to make sure people want to do it. And so part of that is making clear the civic importance of it and the role that people would play. But part of it also, I think you would need to pay people well and make sure their work and family life is protected in various ways. Sort of as with jury service in the United States and other places where they have legal provisions to protect people while they're serving in this role.
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B
How Long would you envision people serving in this way? Because I can imagine doing that for a week, but in a week I wouldn't have mastered the kind of things I need to know to make a good decision. So presumably it's a lot longer than a week.
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C
Yeah, that is a hard issue to figure out exactly how long it should be because as you suggest, a short amount of time, easy to do, but people won't be up to speed, they won't be competent. So I actually suggest three years as a term of service. Wouldn't be every day of those three years though. It'd be sort of chunks of time throughout that three year interval.
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B
I love the idea that this is well compensated. It really is like winning the lottery or would be for some people.
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C
Yeah, I suggest it should be something like a minimum amount of money that would be considerable so that even people who were unemployed or really weren't making very much money for them, it'd be quite a windfall. I don't think it would end up being all that much. So I suggests United States dollars, something like $100,000 a year or something like that. So it would be considerable compensation for people's time. But the rich wouldn't be particularly excited to take this up now.
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B
For me, a basic problem in practical politics is corruption. The possibility that representatives are swayed not by argument and evidence, but by powerful people who. Who promise or imply promises, gifts, money, force. How do you avoid that in this system?
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C
Yeah, I think actually one of the great advantages of random selection is you don't have to have people raising money to run electoral campaigns. And there's no worry about courting favor with the media or the other powerful elites to be presented in a favorable light for electoral purposes. These are people just randomly chosen. They'll rotate through power. They won't be in those roles for very long. So it won't be all that valuable to capture any one of them. And you can put in place laws that would really protect against graft and corruption of an explicit kind of quid pro quo kind. And in particular you might be able to condition the payment that they're receiving on them not taking money from outsiders. You could even give them a reward if somebody comes trying to bribe them to vote a certain way. If they turn this person in, they could get additional benefit. So I think we could use traditional law around corruption and it helps not requiring people to campaign or run for office or have to court favor with the elites.
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B
And who would be the citizenry in this case? Would some people be Excluded, for instance, people in jail or people who have been in jail or people who have been found guilty of fraud in the past. Who would be excluded?
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C
Yeah, it's a great issue in my thinking about it. I feel like it should be set sort of where we set voting eligibility. So people who are eligible to vote, that varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. So some places people who've been convicted of a felony can't ever vote. I think that's unreasonable. I actually think in many places even people who are currently incarcerated should be given a role in the political system. So I argue for using those people, trying to figure out a way to get them to participate. There might be some kinds of crimes where if you're convicted of those, we'd worry about your ability to participate in a good faith way. But I would think those would be very much the exception.
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B
So what are the advantages of this system of representation by lottery?
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C
Yeah, so I think there are a number. So one is, I think the theory behind elections was that we'd pick people who would do well by us once they have political power. I worry that accountability mechanism is really broken down. We see a lot of capture of the elected officials so they do the bidding of the wealthiest elites in the society. I also think elections create a kind of division in the political community, pitting us against each other in regular ways that I think actually quite corrosive. I think elections also encourage a sort of short term thinking, trying to do things that you can get a lot of credit for. And I think random selection nicely addresses a lot of those things. So it allows us to work together on issues where we might agree doesn't require this kind of fighting in the big electoral way every two to four years. So I think in those ways you might get just as good effective policy. I also think it gets people in power who have a lot of knowledge relevant to the task, but ordinarily wouldn't be included. So people who actually use government benefits and actually face these problems in an urgent way now, they'd be in these roles, thinking about these problems. And I think that changes the commitment and dedication.
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B
I'm surprised you didn't mention participation because for me part of the attraction of this system would be anybody in principle really could participate in government. It's not just ticking a box at election time. You could be an active participant making decisions that really matter.
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C
Yeah, I think it's an interesting kind of mixed bag in a way. On the one hand, the way I suggest we run the system, we would lose this regular thing where everyone gets to have this very small role of getting to vote. On the other hand, some people would get a much larger role. And I think the interesting thing is the broad community would still stay very involved in various ways, talking to the randomly chosen people about what they ought to do, because they won't come in with an agenda or any plan. So there will be extensive community consultation and learning from the broader community as people try to think through what they actually should do with the power. But I do love one element of the system that I think is really compelling is the way it really shows we're all in the same boat. Any of us might govern. And I think it is a kind of commitment to political equality that we really don't see with mass elections.
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B
How do you avoid the problem that lots of people who would get power won't have a clue about what they're doing? It sounds patronizing, but their educational levels may preclude a kind of critical analysis of the sorts of materials they're going to engage with. But also emotional volatility, incapacity to negotiate and compromise, all those things could absolutely be damaging for a country.
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C
Yeah, I think it's a really interesting question. Would ordinary people be up to the task? So one of the things I think is really important is making that task more manageable. So being able to focus just on one policy area, I think makes it a bit more manageable. I'd also really recommend using some kind of learning phase where people hear from experts and advocates and stakeholders about different ideas with respect to the policy. There still might be some people for whom it'd be a challenge, but we don't have to just live in the theoretical world. Citizens assemblies have been used around the world to think about things like climate change and what kind of energy policy we should have. And the citizens selected there have done very well, I think, overall. And there might be some issues where it's a bit more of a challenge, but for a lot of things, we already are playing this role with broad based voting and political input in this way. So I think the hope is people would be up to the task. And if they aren't, if their education level isn't there, that's a reason to be more committed to broad education if we really want to be a democratic community.
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B
Usually voters in democracies have a threshold age level. I think it's still 18 in Britain, but there's pressure for it to be 16. Many of the arguments you've used seem to be arguments that could support the idea that much younger children could be actively participating, particularly on issues which affect them. They might know better than anyone else about issues in the classroom, about early education, possibly also about digital social media and the risks and complications of banning or not banning certain of those.
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C
Yeah. I mean, my inclination is to think they would often be able to provide very useful input. I'm not sure if they would be appropriate in the role of like making these decisions. 10 is quite young. I've got a 10 year old myself. She's very wise, but I don't know if I'd want her making education policy yet. But I think certainly 15, 16, they're starting to really be thoughtful. And as you suggest, people would really have a different kind of commitment to the issue. And I think one worry about a lot of elected systems is that it skews very old in a way, so that the people making decisions often are already past all these things and sort of looking to the near term rather than the long term.
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B
In an aging country, presumably there'd be a high hit rate for very old people getting to be representatives. Wouldn't that skew the system in Japan? If you put the system in, you're going to get a lot of old people in government.
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C
Well, at least in the United States, we already have a lot of really old people in government, not just at the presidential level, but the average age of The Senate is 63. If you were to use random selection, the average age would be something more like 36. And so that's quite a shift in people who would be in these roles.
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B
So what's the best argument you've heard against your quite radical proposal?
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C
Well, one of the arguments that really worries me anyway is this question of would people be up to the task, would they be capable of doing it, and would they eventually run into people trying to capture them and influence them and so worry either that the bureaucrats, the civil servants, the experts who might speak to them, whether these people would have too much influence. And I think that's kind of an open question. So my own view is we should start small scale, try this out and see where are their problems. Where does it seem like there seems to be too much influence and not enough coming from the people themselves.
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B
How does this differ from the idea of a citizens Assembly? Because that seems to be quite a powerful idea and I know it's been tried a lot in France.
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C
You know, I love the Citizens assembly model and in some ways I'm really drawing on it and thinking about trying to scale it up a little bit. The worry I have about Citizens assemblies is that they've often been sort of working on the side of what elected politicians are doing. And they can be used in various ways by those politicians, either to serve as a kind of COVID or to be largely ignored and kind of allow people to say, well, there was broad input here, but in fact it's not really taken up. And so my worry is that a lot of the things that I'm concerned about with elections will remain if we continue to have elections as a central part of the system.
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B
Athenian democracy tried this with a sortal system. Did it work for them? Is it the same model or is yours different?
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C
Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting story. So in ancient Athens, you know, several of the major institutions were populated by random selection. And Aristotle and others say things like, if you want oligarchy, use elections, if you want democracy, use lot. And so it really fades from the story of democracy and it's, I think, having a resurgence partly because people are frustrated with elections. I'm no expert on ancient Athens in terms of how well it functioned. One of the big questions has been, you know, Athens is a relatively small city state. Is this the same as a 50 million or 300 million person country? Could we scale this kind of system up to work at that level? And I think that's the question I really try to take up.
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B
Are you a lone voice here or are there a group of people thinking along similar lines?
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C
Definitely not a lone voice. So there's quite a few academics, a few philosophers, so more in political theory and political science who are working on the ground, studying the citizens assemblies that have been created. But I think this is a place where the philosophers and the academics are a bit behind the real world, where there's lots of experimentation but not quite as much philosophy or theory about what's being done, why it might be attractive. So one of the exciting things is you can look out in the world and see things that are happening. So, you know, in Britain, the Sortition foundation is working to make the House of Lords into a House of citizens that would be selected randomly. And it's exciting and I think there's a lot of frustration with how democracy is working and a lot of openness to new ideas. So for me there's quite a large community, but many of them aren't in the philosophical world.
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B
I don't want to put a damper on something which is a really exciting and positive spin on politics, but this isn't going to happen, is it? Because you're going to have to have politicians voting for this?
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C
Well, it's a long, long strategy I think, to imagine it being put in place. One pathway though that I really can see is trying out things at a small scale, seeing how it works. And if there's enough enthusiasm around it, I think there might start to be pressure in this direction. Maybe the last place will be the federal government of the United States. It's very entrenched. Hard to see that working there anytime soon. But I think you're already seeing all over the world lots of experiments in this direction. And so that gives me hope that maybe down the road once we've learned more, see how it works, we really might start to see Sortition playing a larger role.
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B
Alexander Guerrero, thank you very much.
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C
My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.
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A
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