I’ve waited a decade for Alexander Guerrero’s book, Lottocracy: Democracy without Elections.
No exaggeration.
I wrote to him in 2015 after I read his brilliant 43-page journal article: Against Elections: The Lottocratic Alternative, that he published the year before.
He wrote back that he was working on a book based on the article.
I was excited because of our congruent thinking.
I too had been musing about what Guerrero calls SILLs — single-issue lottery-selected legislatures.
In his new book, while he acknowledges that “the most notable feature of the lottocratic system is the central use of randomly selected citizens,” he challenges the conventional thinking that a legislature must deal with all legislative issues.
Instead he proposes “a standing network of twenty single-issue legislative bodies, each comprised of 450 elected representatives,” covering a range of issues from agriculture and food safety to crime and punishment to health and medicine to immigration and naturalization to treasury and taxation.
With specialized legislatures it is easier for ordinary people to develop a reasonable understanding of a particular aspect of government.
His book goes into detail:
Each SILL consists of 450 people, chosen at random, to serve three-year terms, with 150 new people starting each year and 150 people finishing their term each year.
People would not be legally required to serve if selected, but the financial incentives would be considerable (perhaps a floor of $100,000 per year, with anyone whose regular income was above the floor being paid 1.1 times their normal yearly income).
Family and work responsibilities would be accommodated by subsidy and law so that individuals or their families are not penalized professionally for serving.
SILL members would not have contact with certain people or entities while serving on the SILL and would not receive money or other forms of compensation from them before or after SILL service.
There would be some mechanism for removing people for bad behavior—failing to attend meetings, speaking over others or being hostile toward others, showing up intoxicated, etc.—but this mechanism should be structured to protect those who simply are unlikable or who have divergent views.
