This is Philosophy Bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

Philosophy Bites is available at www. www.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. Alex Guerrero, welcome to Philosophy Bites. Thank you so much for having me.

The topic we're going to focus on is lotocracy. What on earth is that?

So a lot of different ideas. The basic one behind what I call lotocracy 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 lotocracy as a full-scale replacement. So no elections in any part of the

system and just trying to build everything using randomly selected citizens.

So the name comes from lots, drawing lots.

Absolutely, yes. I like that name better than sortition. People don't really know what that is.

Sounds kind of sorted, sedition, sort of not as catchy. So government by use of lottery. So this is a selection of

representatives by a random mechanism. Is that right? 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, 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. And would this be compulsory? I mean,

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