Civil Society Brunch: Democracy without Elections?

The Civil Society Initiative at Washington University in St. Louis is pleased to present a public talk by Alex Guerrero, Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University and author of Lottocracy: Democracy without Elections.  Professor Guerrero is a leader scholar of "lottocracy" (also known as "sortition"), whereby public officials or political representatives are selected at random.  

All are welcome; RSVP below if you plan to attend.  

Abstract: Democracy is in trouble. What is going wrong? What should we do?  In this talk, I will suggest that perhaps surprisingly, the problem is with the heart of modern democracy: the election. Elections are failing as accountability mechanisms. Elections provide powerful short-term incentives, leading elected politicians to downplay long-term catastrophic concerns. Elections create division where none need exist. The most powerful among us take advantage of this to control who is elected, what policies are enacted, and which problems are ignored. Policy complexity, citizen ignorance, elite capture and manipulation, algorithmically reinforced echo chambers, intensifying partisan division and distrust, and the dissolution of political community combine to render modern electoral democracies incapable of helping us solve the urgent problems we face.  Although electoral democracy may have been better than all systems that have been tried, the basic mechanism at its core-the election-is broken, and unworkable under modern political conditions.  We should move past the Churchillian shrug ("the worst system, except for all the others") and consider a new form of democracy: lottocracy.  Lottocratic systems include many new elements, but the most striking is the shift from using elected representatives to using representatives selected through lottery.  The second half of the talk introduces and discusses lottocratic systems, their potential advantages, and potential concerns.

This event is sponsored by the Frick Initiative and the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy.