We’ve noted philosopher Alex Guerrero’s striking work on lottocracy in the past. I want to commend to interested readers the very informative and nuanced review by Amanda Greene. She makes one of the most interesting criticisms of lottocracy, one I had not seen elsewhere:

Guerrero admits that it might seem that lottocratic institutions offer citizens fewer outlets to get involved in issues that move them, thereby neglecting a core democratic value. His response is to pose the philosophical question: what is valuable in the first place about an individual’s ability to participate in politics? Assuming that it is about having a say, he points out that the lifetime odds of serving a turn in a lottocratic institution (roughly 12%) is an opportunity that is more meaningful than the vanishingly small odds of influencing an electoral outcome (326-329). On the other hand, if it is about political advocacy, he says, then the opportunities under lottocratic institutions are more or less equivalent to things as they now stand. By the end of the exercise, Guerrero has factored out the elements of participation in such a way that whatever makes them valuable is addressed just as well by lottocratic institutions as by electoral ones. Again, one may ask: just a coincidence?

It’s useful for Guerrero to separate out and zoom in on these aspects of participation, but the segmentation of conceptual space makes it harder to see the big picture. People’s desire to participate—to ‘have a say’ in the decisions that affect them—is not necessarily about shaping policy in any determinate way. Sometimes, folks just want a ready outlet to express their dissatisfaction. Casting a vote for a certain party or candidate can be a way of registering discontent, but such ‘protest votes’ can also affect the development of a party platform. Voting affords both opportunities at once. If electoral participation opportunities can be good in multiple ways, their value may amount to more than the sum of their parts by virtue of their convergence.