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Essais critiques

The Oasis and the Mirage. Lottocracy as a Test for Democratic Theory

Théophile Pénigaud de Mourgues
p. 635-660
Référence(s) :

Cristina Lafont and Nadia Urbinati, TheLottocratic Mentality: Defending Democracy against Lottocracy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024, 532 pages, 978-019289063-4

Texte intégral

  • 1 In Lottocracy: Democracy without Elections (Guerrero, 2024). For a joint review of the two books, s (...)

1Democracy is in bad shape almost everywhere. More than ever, democratic institutions and the demanding standards towards which they aspire must be defended. Yet these cannot be defended well unless they are properly conceived. In this respect, The Lottocratic Mentality: Defending Democracy against Lottocracy by Nadia Urbinati and Cristina Lafont (2024) matters greatly. At the same time, democratic theory must also guard itself against complacent idealism, where rational reconstruction, rationalization, and path dependence converge. On this point, Guerrero’s recent attempt to steer political systems away from the authoritarian drift that free elections seem unable to prevent is commendable.1

2Both books, however, understate what we do and do not know about citizens’ assemblies. Based on first-hand observations of two high-profile French citizens’ assemblies, I show that Guerrero and Lafont and Urbinati exhibit a similar—and problematic—idealistic approach: they treat citizens’ assemblies as a conceptual question while overlooking important lessons from their actual practice. Moreover, their normative framing tends to obscure rather than clarify the dynamics that matter for understanding and evaluating the evolution of democracy.

3I begin by reconstructing the central argument of Lafont and Urbinati’s The Lottocratic Mentality (Section 1), before offering an internal evaluation that probes its strengths and limitations on its own terms (Section 2). I then broaden the scope to an external critique, questioning the authors’ portrayal of lottocracy as a form of technopopulism, on the principle that a critique must at least remain intelligible to those it is addressed. Rather than entering a purely conceptual dispute, however, I stress that both sides tend to overlook the lessons of real-world citizens’ assemblies. Moreover, the proliferation of lottocratic proposals raises issues left unanswered in The Lottocratic Mentality, pointing to new avenues for research bearing on the assessment and nature of democratic legitimacy (Section 3). From there, the fourth and final section develops methodological reflections of broader relevance for democratic theory. Here, I contend that democratic theory should avoid both complacent realism (dismissing novel institutions because they lack precedent) and what I term complacent idealism (retroactively projecting our ideals onto existing ones). In this spirit, I make the case for a non-dogmatic, empirically informed approach to democratic innovations, which I call “procedural pluralism”: legitimacy should be pursued through experimentation with multiple power-distributing mechanisms, constrained only by the requirement of uncoerced, unmanufactured public consent. I thus advocate for a “democratic theory of democracy”, one whose main implication is that the democratic requirement should apply to itself. A democratic theory of democracy does not amount to relativism. But it does imply that disputes about what counts as democratic cannot be settled by conceptual analysis alone—nor, subsequently, by theorists alone (Section 4).

1. The Puzzle of Lottocracy

  • 2 They unearth Harold J. Laski (1893-1950), Guglielmo Giannini (1891-1960), and Marie Collins Swabey (...)

4Since the financial crisis of 2008, a wide range of academic inquiries and activist initiatives have examined and endorsed sortition as a potential alternative to elections for selecting decision-makers. As highlighted by the authors, several precursors throughout the 20th century had already argued that selection by lot offered virtues in terms both of descriptive representation and deliberative efficiency.2 They rightly point out, however, the role played by the success of deliberative polls and other “minipublics” in reinforcing a certain belief: that “citizen-representatives” might be better positioned than an elected elite to represent the perspectives and lived experiences of citizens, and to make decisions on their behalf (Landemore, 2020; Sintomer, 2023; Guerrero, 2024). This hype around lottocracy had, until now, only met with scattered responses (Malkopoulou, 2015; Umbers, 2018; Landa and Pevnick, 2021; Lever, 2023). The Lottocratic Mentality presents the first coordinated intellectual reply to this fashionable trend. Despite considerable diversity among sortition’s proponents, the authors see in the enthusiasm for granting decision-making power to randomly selected assemblies the expression of a distinct “mentality.”

5Arguably, concepts derive the greater part of their value and meaning from the problem they seek to address. In this instance, the problem reads as follows: how could lotteries—an institution that allows a handful of people selected at random to make decisions “as they see fit” (11, 173, 181-2, 187, 216, 221, 224) and impose their political will on the rest of the citizenry—come to be regarded as a way of radicalizing democracy? The concept of a “lottocratic mentality” is the solution to this puzzle. This “mentality” comprises several features, each of which risks obscuring what is most valuable and most worth defending in modern democracy: collective self-determination and political freedom.

6Specifically, the authors highlight three conceptual confusions, each “highly misleading in relation to democracy” (18):

    • 3 See also Umbers (2018) and Lever (2024).

    First, the proponents of sortition mistake equality of probability for democratic equality. They argue that random selection is more inclusive because each individual is granted a considerably more equal probability to represent others in a meaningful, civic-minded capacity, regardless of their social, economic, cultural, or sexual capital (e.g. Landemore, 2020). In this respect, they miss a fundamental aspect of elections: candidates do not run for office as extraordinary individuals (about whom voters sometimes know nothing), but as figures running on platforms, representing competing political paths and seeking to mobilize specific groups of citizens on that basis (74 ff.). Lottocrats tend to align with minimalists in endorsing a deflationary conception of universal suffrage: electoral voting, they argue, does not allow citizens to exercise power under sufficiently controlled conditions, since it is, in fact, captive to a supposedly corrupt elite. Regardless of whether this is accurate or not, the authors aptly respond that “in order to be regarded as political equals, citizens must be in a position to exercise power omnilaterally, rather than allow a few citizens to unilaterally impose their political decisions on all the others” (181). This is what elections enable: in “choosing some political programs and parties over others”, citizens “exercise their political freedom collectively” by shaping “the ideological space within which the elected representatives must operate until the next election” (7). By contrast, equalizing the chances of ruling “does not mean that citizens stand in a relationship of political equality with one another.” What is equalized, instead, is the probability to “exercise unilateral power over others” (188).3

  1. From here, the puzzle only deepens: how could granting each individual the same “close to zero” (177) chance of participating in decision-making reasonably be understood as a way of giving power back to the people? The explanation lies in a (mis)understanding of political representation conceived as embodiment. Citizens would no longer need to influence the decisions of the randomly selected assembly, since it would already contain within itself the relevant socio-demographic characteristics required to make decisions that the citizenry would, anyway, have made under proper conditions of information and deliberation. One recognizes, here, the counterfactual claim once formulated by James Fishkin (1995), which identifies a minipublic’s judgement with the one the public at large would have reached had it been able to deliberate under good informational conditions). In this context, the claim is misleadingly deployed not to gauge the tendencies of public opinion, but rather to legitimize the capture of democratic deliberation by a supposedly representative microcosm. As Lafont and Urbinati rightly point out, such reasoning rests on an “assumption of homogeneity” (206), one that lottocratic theorists share with populists. Populists, too, proclaim that “only the people can serve the people” (203), with the representatives of the people substituting for the people and thereby making participation superfluous. Then, the lottocrats’ seemingly inexplicable disdain for universal suffrage is no surprise. Yet this understanding of representation, the authors argue, undermines the very foundation of democratic legitimacy as lottocrats themselves conceive it; that is, as arising from mutual justification among citizens. What collapses with the homogeneity assumption is the requirement that those who hold power justify its exercise with reasons that other citizens might endorse (214), since they claim instead to embody the people’s voice.

  2. How is it possible that deliberative democracy leads to such an open disregard for the test of justifiability before the citizenry? The answer lies in an understanding of politics as essentially a matter of problem-solving. On this view, the task of politics is not to reach a “fragile” agreement even though “our fellow citizens have different interests, values, priorities, and policy objectives”. Instead, it is to identify problems that can, for the most part, be collectively solved, provided they are properly “acknowledged” (225). Hence, the idea of delegating this “task” to a randomly selected assembly. Hélène Landemore (222-223) has indeed advanced the view that cognitive diversity justifies democratic inclusion, treating a randomly selected assembly as akin to an assembly of experts (Landemore, 2012). Guerrero, for his part, charges political parties with fostering more disagreement than is reasonable, arguing that the ratio between areas of agreement and disagreement could well be reversed under different institutional conditions (226-227).

7The puzzle nevertheless remains unresolved, for the authors conclude that “the ‘mirror’ claim and the ‘filter’ claim are mutually incompatible” (229). In other words, not only does the lottocratic ideal undermine democracy, but it is also hopelessly incoherent. In truth, the authors show little concern that a political “lottocracy” might be established in the near future—a prospect they regard as highly unlikely (this is the one point on which they seem to agree with the lottocrats). What concerns them is that support for the lottocratic alternative may reflect much deeper and more politically troubling tendencies that come at the expense of citizens’ political freedom and equality, and of the capacity to shape the course of public action by choosing among competing, coherent visions of a desirable future. According to the authors, if I understand them correctly, the “lottocratic mentality” risks functioning as a veneer for both populist aspirations (seeking the incarnation of the people, whether by a figure or by an assembly acting in their name) and technocratic aspirations (aiming to free problem-solving from the gridlock of partisan conflict). The lottocratic mentality would ultimately amount to abandoning democracy understood as a reflexive, open-ended exchange of views and arguments among equals, in which citizens are given equal opportunities to determine the preferable course of collective action.

8Yet, just because the authors reject the lottocratic mentality, this does not mean they deny any value to minipublics. At the end of the book, the authors come to defend what I take to be its most valuable contribution: specifically, that the role of minipublics should not be to embody who we are or even to speak on our behalf, but rather to inform us more effectively (243). The reversal from “being like us” to “speaking to us” is compelling. What we should lament, according to the authors, is not that minipublics do not exert greater influence over decision-makers—for that would represent a morally dubious and politically risky shortcut—but that they do not empower the citizenry as a whole. Provided they are disentangled from lottocratic mentality, randomly selected assemblies could thus find their rightful place within the framework of deliberative democracy, to which they owe their contemporary revival.

2. A Genealogy of the Error

9Not only does the final proposal represent a breath of fresh air amid the proliferation of lottocratic blueprints, especially given the authenticity of its alliance with deliberative democracy, but in many respects, the authors have compellingly sought to beat the lottocrats at their own game; no advocate of sortition can therefore afford to overlook the book’s first, lengthy part.

  • 4 According to the authors, Elster opened the path, and Manin followed it. The former examined sortit (...)

10By revisiting the pioneering texts of Robert Dahl and Jon Elster, the authors insist that more sophisticated and cautious conceptions of sortition had once been developed, only to be overshadowed by the rise of the “lottocratic mentality.” This history is teleologically oriented, amounting to what one might call a genealogy of the error. Through contemporary intellectual history, the authors demonstrate how sortition and election came to be misleadingly opposed to one another as if they were interchangeable methods of selection endowed with intrinsic properties.4

11According to Lafont and Urbinati, this one-to-one comparison has proven to be a major source of confusion. Even if we look at elections purely from the point of view of candidates, they argue that it is a mistake to reduce them to individuals’ chances to be chosen. It is an “obvious fact” (74) that candidates do not present themselves for election as extraordinary individuals, but as representatives of political options and competing visions of the future. In this respect, lottocrats fail to compare like with like.

  • 5 On the obsolescence of the principle of distinction, see also Mansbridge (2023).
  • 6 Part of the historical discussions then turns to the Athenian model, which has long served as a fou (...)

12The authors also note a certain contradiction in Manin (1997)’s “pure theory” of elections, in which their aristocratic nature is derived from the constraint of “salience.” From the voters’ perspective, the oligarchic effects of elections have nothing to do with any recognition of the political class’s superiority; if anything, voters are more inclined to believe that politicians have more vices than they do.5 If at all, the “superiority” of elected representatives is “trivially true” (79), but it applies to the relationship between candidates—because some are elected over others—and not between candidates and voters. The authors concede, however, that this reading somewhat distorts Manin’s position, since Manin located the democratic dimension of elections precisely in the fact that voters are free to decide which reasons are “politically relevant” in preferring one candidate over another. “There may be other ways to justify the claim that elections are inherently ‘aristocratic’,” they write. “What we hope to have shown, however, is that lottocrats cannot prove this claim simply by relying on Manin’s argument” (80).6

13Another aspect of the argument likely to be of great interest to proponents of sortition is the authors’ dismissal of both the most radical proposals that call for the replacement of elections by lotteries wherever possible, and the more moderate ones, which advocate for combining both sources of legitimacy—most often through a second or third randomly selected chamber (Abizadeh, 2020; Gastil and Wright, 2018; Vandamme and Verret-Hamelin, 2017). Strikingly, they draw on Guerrero’s criticisms of any possibility of combining the two logics to disqualify even the moderate strand of lottocrats (102-115). Since this debate engages precisely the kind of reasoning I will later suggest bracketing, I shall leave it to other critics to assess their argumentation on that point.

  • 7 In this, they join Jane Mansbridge, who has long advocated that participants may testify to the fac (...)

14Against both substitution or complementary proposals, the authors contrast an auxiliary approach, in which minipublics serve as a mechanism of last resort or a corrective against well-known pathologies of electoral democracy: capture by powerful actors, poorly informative debates, and polarization. Strikingly, Lafont and Urbinati write that “the central question surrounding the democratic legitimacy of minipublics is not about how much power they ought to exercise but rather about the capacity in which they are supposed to exercise that power” (234). Minipublics should not carry the burden of deciding on behalf of everyone else; rather, they could become “mediating bodies between formal institutions and the wider public, with the aim of making these institutions more responsive to the interests, values, and policy objectives of the entire citizenry” (237). Instead of determining the “right” or “best” answer to problems of common concern, the role of minipublics could be to make visible the plurality of views in society, together with the reasons for and against various positions. They might thereby enable each citizen to retrace the same lines of reasoning in light of their own interests, values, and policy objectives.7

15From there, the authors concede that ambitious proposals for integrating minipublics into the political system are conceivable. They note in particular that the currently fashionable models—allowing citizens to petition Parliament and compel it to take a position on the proposals of self-initiated citizens’ assemblies—belong to the weaker end of the spectrum of legitimate uses, since mere agenda-setting without ratification is unsatisfactory. Ultimately, they endorse a proposal that would give the citizenry the right to initiate and ratify certain proposals, with a minipublic tasked with selecting and amending ballot measures. This would allow citizens to disrupt traditional political processes where gridlock prevents them from securing outcomes they overwhelmingly support. Undoubtedly, the proposal advanced by Lafont and Urbinati is lottocratic, lending considerable power to a citizens’ assembly. And this, without succumbing to the “lottocratic mentality.” Yet the question remains as to whether this concept retains a heuristic value beyond the idiom the two authors have fashioned for themselves.

3. What We Can and Can’t Know: Humbling Lessons from Real-World Citizens’ Assemblies

16With The Lottocratic Mentality, Lafont and Urbinati deliver an excellent piece of intellectual history and advance a robust theoretical framework through which to approach the role of minipublics in democracy. Yet the book fails to provide the conceptual clarity required to defend and justify democracy, regardless of whether lotteries are at play. First, the concept of the “lottocratic mentality”, conflated with a kind of “technopopulism,” adds to the confusion it is meant to dispel. Second, Lafont and Urbinati’s critique, no less than most lottocrats’ approaches, overemphasises the concept of a “citizens’ assembly” while underemphasising its empirical reality. Third, they fail to address the very problem that could justify creating a concept in the first place.

3.1 Is Lottocracy A Kind of “Technopopulism”?

17Lafont and Urbinati do not resolve the puzzle of “lottocracy.” Lottocrats, they argue, cannot “have it both ways” (229): the filter claim and the mirror claim are incompatible. Yet, in electoral representation, the claim to represent the diversity of views present in society and the claim to filter out the most pertinent among them do not seem to contradict one another. Nor do they appear to be mutually incompatible in the auxiliary use of minipublics promoted by the authors themselves. On the contrary, it is precisely because randomly selected citizens can draw on their representativeness that the well-considered reasons leading them to adopt a yes-or-no stance “are likely to be those that resonate with the rest of the citizenry” (240).

18The contradiction only holds if one falls either into populism or into technocracy. But lottocrats, as far as I can tell, explicitly reject both. The concept of “lottocratic mentality” thus seems to fail the test of civility, which requires presenting others’ positions in relatable terms they themselves might recognize. The assimilation of lottocracy to technocracy is misleading, for lottocrats reject the authority of experts and conceive of the randomly selected assembly as a political body. As Estlund has argued, any designation of a politically superior subset introduces “invidious distinctions” (Estlund, 2009) among citizens—a kind of inequalities to which lottocrats appear deeply opposed (recall Montesquieu’s oft-cited remark that “the lot is a way of selecting that offends no one”). The assimilation of lottocracy to populism is equally misleading, for the assumption that political authority could derive from descriptive representativeness verges on the absurd. Who would ever declare: “You must obey me, because I am like you”?

  • 8 I have myself criticized the identification of democracy with a mere requirement of congruence in R (...)

19I do not wish to embark on a lengthy discussion of the concept of political representation because I find myself in agreement with the authors’ account.8 I merely wish to question the contention that, between the paths of “mandate”, “mirroring”, and “responsibility”, lottocrats have opted for the second to the exclusion of the others (139). I wonder what this could even mean. Without a mandate, a randomly selected assembly is nothing more than a collection of individuals, a group dissolved as soon as it is formed, with no common purpose and no interest in reaching agreement. Regarding responsibility, it is worth noting that a randomly selected assembly, lacking any “title to govern” (Rancière and Corcoran, 2007), could derive its political authority only from the consent of the citizenry. To secure that consent, a lottocratic assembly would in all likelihood have to perform the justificatory work that Lafont and Urbinati seem to associate exclusively with “auxiliary” proposals. Moreover, Lafont and Urbinati say very little about the responsibility citizen-representatives bear toward one another, or about “deliberative” and “informal” accountability (Mansbridge, 2009; Vandamme, 2023). They proceed as if randomly selected citizens spoke with a single, unified voice that could thereby stand in opposition to the public as a whole.

3.2 Theory and Empirics

20At this juncture, I am reminded of the Rousseauian injunction, “Do not argue about arguments and do not base your position on speeches” (Rousseau, [1763] 2013, 56). I shall therefore strive to practice what I preach, and confine myself to what I know—or so I believe—which is very little, and yet contrasts so sharply with what I read on the matter that I feel justified in setting it forth.

  • 9 The phrase is borrowed from Estlund (1997).

21It must first be noted that neither Guerrero, Lafont and Urbinati, Landemore, nor I are in a position to say how the general public would respond to decisions made by a randomly-selected assembly; whether a vibrant political public sphere could be maintained or would collapse once even the already weak incentives of elections were removed; how randomly selected representatives would behave—as “queens for a day”9 or selfless ambassadors of others (and of whom); whether they would be more or less susceptible to corruption and lobbying than elected representatives; or how political divisions would reproduce, what forms of compromise would be found, and how deliberative negotiations might be articulated and arbitrated in the absence of parties. Nothing, whether in political science or in the observations made so far, allows anyone to resolve these questions. On all these points, there may be good reasons to think one way or the other and assigning probabilities can only be a game.

22What strikes me most, however, is that the little we do know about randomly selected assemblies appears largely orthogonal to the way the debate has taken shape, which has been around a concept absent from both the discourse and the thinking of participants in these assemblies: the concept of political representation. Lafont and Urbinati fall into the same trap they warn against, attributing virtues to minipublics based on the glittering success of deliberative polls, of which Fishkin has long served as the indefatigable champion. In doing so, they overlook a plausible explanation for the enthusiasm surrounding Citizens’ Assemblies: their idealization.

  • 10 I observed the final sessions of the Citizens’ Convention on Climate (CCC) and the entirety of the (...)
  • 11 See Landemore and Pénigaud de Mourgues, “Citizen-legislators: Citizens on Top and Experts on Tap in (...)

23have observed two such Assemblies (called “Conventions Citoyennes” in France)10 which, given the level of media attention they received and the ambition of their mandate, more or less match lottocratic assemblies.11 Endorsed by the government as sources of legitimate public claims, their reports were awaited and scrutinized, certain to be debated and commented upon by numerous political actors as well as by civil society. These assemblies bear little resemblance to Fishkin’s polls. Their members did more than voice considered individual opinions; they articulated a collective stance, for which they later proved willing to advocate and which they expected would shape the political agenda.

24Some observations:

    • 12 See Luskin et al. (2002) and Goodin and Niemeyer (2003). More generally, experts play a predominant (...)

    The deliberative quality of minipublics may be internally genuine, but it is far from externally evident. The quality of judgments formed within these assemblies results more from the information provided than from deliberation itself, which is self-reported to have little influence on opinion change.12

  • Group identity rests on recognition of the mandate, which is rarely challenged or questioned. The guiding norm is that of “doing a good job.”

  • Randomly selected participants generally do not claim to represent others, to speak in their name, or to advocate on their behalf. Most consider themselves exempt from such political work of representing others. When asked whether they represented the wider public, or whether they were there to advocate for a particular cause or for particular interests, a vast majority of respondents to the Citizens’ Convention on Climate (CCC) research questionnaire answered instead “I represent “myself”, or “those who are like me” (which, I am inclined to argue, is essentially the same answer).13 As one of my interviewees, a middle-aged woman, put it: “Even without knowing it, and without wanting to, … of course I represented other citizens! Namely, all those who shared my opinion.”14

    • 15 Phrase used by citizens during the debriefing session of the Climate Convention on June 29, 2019 (P (...)

    Participants are ecstatic about their experience, one they “wish for all other citizens” and which they claim will mark them for life. They report experiencing a different kind of politics—politics “in the noble sense of the term”15—as opposed to the brawling they associate with the French National Assembly.

  • Participants develop strong emotional bonds (Landemore, 2026), seek to integrate all points of view and preserve concord, and reject any procedures likely to set them against one another, including majority voting. These new political sites thus appear to constitute a variant of “unitary democracy” (Mansbridge, 1980).

  • Initially grounded in humility, ordinariness, and an ascriptive conception of representation, their sense of legitimacy quickly shifts into a legitimacy of competence, asserted by a group now claiming its own right to public influence.

  • In terms of content, randomly selected citizens speak with a “lower middle-class” accent. Their discourse is neither disruptive nor revolutionary; many would judge the discussions “depoliticizing,” tending toward the lowest common denominator, and steering clear of political parties or contentious viewpoints.

  • Citizens who agree to participate have a distinctive profile and are only imperfectly representative of the citizenry at large. The polling institute, perhaps out of convenience, took the easy way out in its recruitment process (Apouey et al., 2025a). It remains unclear whether the problem of self-selection can ever be overcome.

  • Participants show great compliance and malleability toward the organizing authority, which welcomes them under exceptional conditions, accommodates them, and so forth.

  • Participants also strongly endorse facilitation (Apouey et al., 2025b), which is key to the process’s success. In procedural terms, facilitators act as the true “masterminds” of the deliberations, while operating in relatively unchecked ways.

25These features hardly fit with most lottocratic proposals, but nor do they lend much stronger support to the criticisms directed against lottocracy.

  • 16 A notable exception is Keith Sutherland (Sutherland, 2025), who defends a configuration that Guerre (...)
  • 17 On this point, I refer readers to the special issue I co-edited with Hélène Landemore and Antonin L (...)

26Guerrero, following most proponents of sortition, endorses a “reflective” conception of lottocracy, in which deliberation plays a key role in refining the moral and political judgment of participants.16 In doing so, he may overestimate the deliberative quality of these enclaves while underestimating the extent to which their deliberative potential rests on external facilitation and organization that constantly threaten the autonomy of collective deliberations.17 He may also underestimate the influence of a handful of particularly persuasive advocates of specific causes, which comes at the expense of the consideration of other issues and commitments. Finally, he may overestimate the “collective intelligence” of the assembly, of which what should be counted as a relevant instance remains unclear to me, not to mention the framing effects of the mandate or the irreducibly limited spectrum of approaches and expertise.

  • 18 On this point, reference may be made to the plenary debate during the final session of the Citizens (...)
  • 19 For a pessimist overview see Krashinsky and Achen (2024).

27Not only are participants in these processes alarmingly unaware of the organization’s influence over their work, but they do not appear to conceive of themselves as morally obliged to represent the wider public substantively. The citizens of the CCC ended up distrusting the general public even more than they distrusted the government.18 While, on their own initiative, some citizens did try to mobilize the wider public—for instance, in the Convention on End-of-Life Issues, by drafting a “Manifesto” addressed to their fellow citizens—it is important to remember that randomly selected citizens are neither professional debaters nor skilled orators. This has direct implications regarding the kind of justification they are able to put forward. Expecting a minipublic to provide public reasons or justifications for preferring X over Y, or the reverse, as Lafont and Urbinati recommend, might still be overly idealistic. Participants often struggle to explain why they changed their minds or endorsed a given proposal; they forget their reasons quickly or risk constructing them retrospectively. Note, however, that it is certainly possible to imagine ways of fostering citizens’ sense of commitment to the wider community and to those they effectively represent, while incentivizing them to bring forward not only proposals but, more importantly, reasons which resonate with others. This would simply require a radically different design. Should that happen, it still cannot be taken for granted that the wider public would prove responsive to the plain arguments behind a minipublic’s choices when set against the rhetorically polished ones advanced by political parties, whose raison d’être is electoral persuasion.19

28Empirically, randomly selected assemblies deliver neither what advocates promise nor what critics fear. Both the extent of our ignorance and that of our available knowledge prevent us from safely extrapolating from citizens’ assemblies as we know them to a so-called ‘lottocracy’. Epistemic humility must be our point of departure. It is from this starting point that democratic theory can rediscover the proper role of ideals.

3.3 Reaction or Problematization? An Alternative Research Agenda

29Lafont and Urbinati approach the question “How can one be a lottocrat?” conceptually, only to conclude that it is an incoherent notion. Whether or not they are right on this point, it is hardly clear that this was the only and most fruitful approach to the question. If weeds spread across a field, the relevant question is not how unusual or even unsightly they are, but what causes them to grow.

30Like it or not, the enthusiasm for lottocracy may owe less to conceptual confusion than to historical circumstance. Just as certain eras generate distinctive experiences—such as the spleen—or even specific mental afflictions—think of the “mad travelers” (Hacking, 1998)—so too might we be witnessing a mutation of the very concept of legitimacy. This mutation is indeed cause for concern. But by conflating lottocracy, technocracy, and populism, Lafont and Urbinati deprive themselves and their audience of the tools needed to interrogate democracy’s possible transformations.

31The endorsement of lottocracy rests on several presuppositions, each of which raises issues worth investigating on its own.

32First, proponents of sortition believe—rightly or wrongly—that elected officials are not, in fact, politically superior to ordinary citizens. A Tocquevillian approach might be to interpret lottocracy as an additional step in the move towards equality of conditions. Tocqueville observed in The Ancien Régime and the Revolution how the symbolic capital of the nobility was eroded in the second half of the eighteenth century (Tocqueville [1835] 2011, Book II, chap. 3). Something similar now seems to have occurred with respect to political representatives. The growing equalization of levels of education, of status, and of access to information may have rendered elections obsolete as a source of political legitimacy. The question then arises: What qualities are necessary for making good political decisions, and do these overlap with the qualities required to win an election, along with the weak incentive of seeking reelection? To take this question seriously demands a nuanced discussion in the domain of political epistemology. Guerrero and Landemore have both worked in this direction, but they rely almost entirely on formal speculation. We lack comparative studies and concrete examples.

  • 20 For a philosophical account, see Estlund (2009b). On how political preferences may challenge loyalt (...)

33Second, it must be remembered that support for democratic procedures is outcome-constrained, if not outcome-driven.20 A second motivation behind the promotion of lottocracy might be the reasonable hope for decisions more aligned with the common good. Faced with accelerating climate change, rising inequality, and growing hostility between nations, resources and influence being domestically monopolized by a handful of the population so small as to be individually identifiable, is it not understandable that citizens would seek other methods of selection to deliberate in their name and decide in ways they find more beneficial? From my observations of the discussions among participants in French Citizen Conventions, I feel confident in concluding that they threaten the interests of one class: the super-rich. To this, Lafont and Urbinati reply that “superficial changes to the political system—such as replacing elections with sortition as a mechanism of selecting representatives—would unfortunately be powerless to reduce the inequalities of political influence that stem from economic power. Rather, what is needed are profound social and economic changes” (191). I am unsure what such a resignation would imply in practice. As Philip Pettit (2023) has recently reminded us, it would be a fallacy to claim that the State is powerless against the market. Historically, the former has actively shaped the legal conditions of the latter’s development step by step, from property rights to the rise of joint-stock companies. The open questions, then, are: Who really has access to the centers of power? What are these centers (if at all) and how much room for maneuver do political officials truly have?

34A third reason for the growing attraction to minipublics may be the thirst for a different kind of politics and a nostalgia for unitary democracy—a horizon of expectation that might be both transhistorical and transcultural (Mansbridge, 1980). The question then is whether pluralistic, highly differentiated societies can tolerate unitary deliberation, or whether, as Mansbridge drew the “bitter conclusion” in her book (293), unavoidable conflicts call for majoritarian or distributive forms of politics to arbitrate between interests no longer seen as common. Again, the problem remains open: neither Guerrero’s claim that we are naturally less divided than electoral politics makes us appear, nor Lafont and Urbinati’s contention that such claims amount to an attack on pluralism, can count as a satisfying answer. The urgent task, in my view—the one that might decide the fate of lottocracy—is to investigate whether the unitary mindset and love feasts within citizens’ assemblies could survive the pressure of making binding decisions. Would power and interests erode the velvet of deliberation and civility among participants, turned once again into an antagonistic struggle between hostile factions—as the House of Lords’ transformations over the twentieth century bear witness (Shapiro, 1999; 2017)? What voting methods, what forms of compromise or arbitration would be necessary or desirable in the absence of party discipline?

35Finally, Lafont and Urbinati are entirely right to note that

The notion of a ’citizen-representative’ … has yet to be accounted for. For instance, it is unclear how a citizen can simultaneously play the role of a citizen and a representative with respect to one and the same political decision. Are citizen-representatives supposed to act in the role of citizens who speak for themselves, or are they supposed to act as descriptive representatives of those who are like them in a descriptive sense? It is also unclear which obligations citizen-representatives have toward the rest of the citizenry who do not participate in the decision-making process. Can they be meaningfully accountable to nonparticipants while continuing to exercise their rights as citizens to make their own free decisions? If they are not, in which sense can they be taken to represent “the people”? (207)

36That said, Lafont and Urbinati expect from sortition what was never expected from elections. For how is an elected official expected to behave exactly? That question was never clearly settled either (or only in a misleading, highly idealistic manner). It is only retrospectively, and quite late, that the opposition between trustee and delegate was, in a sense, overcome (Pitkin, 1967), and even later that the various forms of influence over elected officials were fully accounted for (e.g. Mansbridge, 2003; Rehfeld, 2009; Urbinati, 2006).

37In truth, a plurality of expectations and reasons can coexist behind the choice of any procedure. Even better, it is precisely when opposing motivations inadvertently overlap that such a procedure has the greatest chance of being selected over another. Lafont and Urbinati seem reluctant to apply to procedures the same criteria they would like citizens to apply to the everyday workings of electoral democracy. Yet in matters of procedure too, the political freedom of citizens must be acknowledged, as well as “the need to reach agreement with fellow citizens” (225) who think differently.

4. Democratic Democratic Theory

38How should democratic theory approach the question of whether lottocracy can claim to represent an authentic democratic alternative? Urbinati and Lafont argue that it cannot: far from being an oasis, it would be a mirage. In doing so, however, they run several risks. The first is prematurely excluding political options that may deserve careful consideration. The second is complacent idealism, which mistakes the rational reconstruction of how institutions work for their actual functioning. The third is advancing a rigid and dogmatic view of democratic legitimacy, to the point of self-contradiction.

4.1 The Swamps of the Plausible

  • 21 Guerrero’s Lottocracy’s introduction is filled with qualifiers (typical of the analytic style): lot (...)

39In the previous section, I have argued that it would be reckless to extrapolate from the current practice of citizens’ assemblies to the hypothesis that they might one day wield sovereign power. Such a transformation would turn them into institutions of an entirely different kind, subject to external public pressure, internal private interests, and power dynamics. Drawing the line between what we know and what we do not know, rather than referring to normative intuitions, should be the starting point of inquiry. I have maintained that the debate around lottocracy has not hinged on what we actually know (very little), but on unverifiable conjectures.21

40For the same reason, however, it does not follow that lottocracy can be dismissed as utopian, nor that it cannot represent a possible oasis in the moving deserts of charismatic authoritarianism. It would be intolerable to surrender to what Estlund (2019) termed “complacent realism,” according to which only what has already been done can be considered possible. Certainly, there is a legitimate role for utopian thinking in political philosophy, grounded not so much in probabilities (for who knows?) as in the exploration of what is normatively desirable within the limits of what is conceivable and makes sense to us. Probabilistic reasoning is pervasive in political theory, under concepts such as the “plausible” or “incentives structure”. Reasonings about what Estlund calls “concessive” norms of justice or legitimacy, phrased in terms of likelihood, as opposed to what is merely possible (but radically unlikely), are indeed important. But they can serve neither to justify nor to definitively dismiss a political option as far-reaching and systemic as lottocracy. Only experimentation can do so.

4.2 Complacent Idealism

41Advocates of deliberative democracy widely agree in rejecting “complacent realism” and symmetrically valuing aspirational ideals (Lafont, 2019; Mansbridge, 2020). Yet when this aspirational approach overlaps with efforts to rationalize the workings of current institutions, it gives rise to another form of complacency. This is what I have coined as complacent idealism, which carries risks on two levels: descriptive and normative.

42On the descriptive level, when the authors write that “when we vote, we do two things at once: we contribute to forming a government or opposition, and we seek to see representations of our positions and preferences” (131), they describe voting not so much from the voters’ standpoint as from logic of institutions. This raises the question of what the right level of analysis is for examining the value and function of democratic institutions: that of the expert, or that of the voter?

43On the normative level, rational reconstruction has its good and its bad. A whole tradition of political thought has more or less explicitly recycled the Hegelian refrain of reconciliation. In this view, political theory’s role is to help us uncover what, in our messy, seemingly contingent institutions, actually reflects the work of Reason (e.g. Rawls, 1993). Rational reconstructions are useful when they equip citizens not only to assess critically their institutions but also their own claims and ultimately empower them. But rational reconstruction can also blunt citizens’ criticisms when it functions like a theodicy, masking reality beneath its idealized image.

44In the long run, the record of liberal democracy since the 1990s is quite mixed: social inequalities, which translate into inequalities of political influence, have continued to widen (Bartels, 2010; Lefkofridi and Giger, 2020; Elsässer et al., 2021). It is unclear what political obligations of citizens in this context remain (Pénigaud de Mourgues, 2024b). Of course, the issue of whether the establishment of lottocratic institutions could provide a solution has not been settled either. As I have already emphasized, no one—not even the advocates of lottocracy—can claim certainty in that respect. The real question, rather, is: Who is entitled to decide?

4.3 Procedural Pluralism

45I wonder how far democratic theory can afford to be normative. The clarificatory enterprise of Lafont and Urbinati, however well-intentioned, sows some unease. For who has the authority to decide what qualifies as democratic? Democratic commitment rests precisely on political equality: no one has the right to override opinions they disagree with by force or by special authority, however wrong they are or may seem (Kelsen, 2013). The question is whether democracy must apply this requirement to itself. Can one debate democratically the meaning of democracy without falling into infinite regress? By situating themselves above the lottocrats and instructing them on the ways of democracy (123-169), Lafont and Urbinati seem to answer this question in the negative, advancing a well-defined conception of what democracy requires and how its ideals should be embodied.

46For sure, there are legitimate limits to the claim of advancing democracy, and one of the tasks of democratic theory is arguably to probe and delineate those limits. Among the most frequently cited paradoxes is that of abolishing democracy through democratic procedures. For example, a government with an absolute majority might gravely erode the conditions of a free political public sphere and the possibility of opposition. In such a case, I join with many others (including Lafont and Urbinati) in the view that such a decision can no longer be regarded as democratic since, by its very content—in threatening citizens’ political equalityit undermines democracy itself (Dworkin, 1997; Christiano, 2008).

47But this is precisely where equating lottocracy with populism becomes problematic. Populism carries potential for democratic closure: a populist party may claim to embody the whole people to consolidate its dominance over others. In doing so, it violates even the minimalists’ approach to democracy, which locates the virtue of elections in the genuine possibility of removing those in power.

48Consider the following thought experiment. Imagine that, inspired by the successful experience of other countries, a majority party were to organize a referendum on a lottocratic proposal (pick your favorite), and that some degree of sortition were approved after a high-quality debate. Suppose further that the integration of sortition into the constitution were both reversible and compatible with the continued existence of a recognized opposition. In such a case, would Lafont and Urbinati still be right to insist that lottocracy is anti-democratic? If so, on what grounds—other than their own political preference? As a follower of Rousseau, I take there to be only one extra-democratic criterion by which a democratically taken decision can be dismissed: namely, a decision that abolishes the future possibility for citizens to redefine, as equals, their form of government. Within those limits, I see no contradiction in allowing that the class of legitimate institutions may be much broader than the familiar set of institutions we currently call ‘democratic’.

  • 22 In fact, the bar is higher than that, but this redirects the inquiry elsewhere. It might concern, f (...)

49Of course, censorship over the formation and expression of opinion would prevent any regime from being grounded in the uncoerced consent of the people. Not every socially accepted policy can qualify as politically legitimate. Perceived and normative legitimacy are not to be conflated. But if a lottocratic regime were constitutionally authorized and could legitimately claim the uncoerced support of a large majority of the population – and this, within a context of free expression and guaranteed fundamental liberties—then I see no compelling reason to disqualify it on grounds of conceptual incoherence, nor to deny its democratic legitimacy.22 If I am right, the authors’ position on lottocracy is that of citizens rather than scholars, and their book should be read accordingly.

50As must now be clear, this paper has been less interested in lottocracy than in what the debate around it reveals. It exposes the fragility of our democratic imagination, easily oscillating between the comfort of the familiar and the seduction of the ideal. A democratic theory worthy of the name, I have argued, should resist both. Its task is not to deliver the readily implementable design of a better regime, but to determine the safety conditions under which citizens may collectively test, contest, and revise what they take democracy to mean. Whether lottocracy turns out to be an oasis or a mirage cannot be decided a priori. Only democratic experience—fallible and revisable—can decide. I have thus called for a renewed critique of pure reason: a reflection on the limits of what can be known, prescribed, or ruled out in advance about democracy, and on the minimal yet fundamental conditions under which democracy remains capable of teaching itself.

I am grateful to Jane Mansbridge, Annabelle Lever, Samuel Hayat, Nathanaël Colin-Jaeger, Ciara Luxton and Pierre-Etienne Vandamme for their feedback on an earlier version of this article. I also wish to thank Nathanaël Colin-Jaeger for inviting me to write this review, which has taken me much further than I had anticipated.

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Notes

1 In Lottocracy: Democracy without Elections (Guerrero, 2024). For a joint review of the two books, see Lever (2025).

2 They unearth Harold J. Laski (1893-1950), Guglielmo Giannini (1891-1960), and Marie Collins Swabey (1891-1966). Certainly, tracing the early history of lottocracy—along with its cultural and political roots—would represent a valuable research program.

3 See also Umbers (2018) and Lever (2024).

4 According to the authors, Elster opened the path, and Manin followed it. The former examined sortition from the standpoint of anti-corruption, focusing on the history of Florence, where neither sortition nor election succeeded in taming civic dissension. The latter inherited the question: given its relatively mixed historical record, what reasons did the founders of representative governments have for discarding sortition entirely as a means of distributing power or selecting rulers?

5 On the obsolescence of the principle of distinction, see also Mansbridge (2023).

6 Part of the historical discussions then turns to the Athenian model, which has long served as a foundational imaginary for advocates of a return to sortition. The status of the nomothetai is the subject of a particularly rich discussion (64-69).

7 In this, they join Jane Mansbridge, who has long advocated that participants may testify to the facts, arguments, and realizations that convinced them to change their minds.

8 I have myself criticized the identification of democracy with a mere requirement of congruence in Revel and Pénigaud de Mourgues (2025). This identification is especially prevalent within the tech sector, where “shortcuts” (Lafont, 2019) appear both more plausible and pernicious than in the case of minipublics.

9 The phrase is borrowed from Estlund (1997).

10 I observed the final sessions of the Citizens’ Convention on Climate (CCC) and the entirety of the Citizens’ Convention on the End-of-life (CCEL) (as well as sessions of its governance committee). I conducted fifteen interviews with former members of the CCEL and processed sixteen interviews conducted by Hélène Landemore during the CCC in addition to seventeen provided by other researchers conducted in the aftermath of the CCC. I was also in close contact with Jean-Michel Fourniau, who sat on the governance committee of the CCC and generously shared with me several valuable archives. While completing this paper, I have begun observation of a third Convention.

11 See Landemore and Pénigaud de Mourgues, “Citizen-legislators: Citizens on Top and Experts on Tap in the French Convention for Climate (2019-2020)”, forthcoming in Perspectives on Politics.

12 See Luskin et al. (2002) and Goodin and Niemeyer (2003). More generally, experts play a predominant role (Elstub et al., 2021).

13 See the citizens’ responses to the CCC questionnaire: https://www.participation-et-democratie.fr/system/files/inline-files/graphiques_s7_0.pdf (Q12). See also Pénigaud de Mourgues (2021; 2023).

14 After I pressed her—“Didn’t you represent citizens outside the assembly? Didn’t you care about them at all?”—she replied: “It’s a very difficult, very complicated question. Because … my opinion is not mine alone! So even without knowing it, and without wanting to, I ended up representing citizens. In France, there are, I don’t know, 70 million of us—I’m not particularly original. So inevitably, without necessarily wanting to, and without even realizing it, of course I represented other citizens! Namely, all those who shared my opinion.”

15 Phrase used by citizens during the debriefing session of the Climate Convention on June 29, 2019 (Pénigaud de Mourgues, personal notes).

16 A notable exception is Keith Sutherland (Sutherland, 2025), who defends a configuration that Guerrero would describe as “quiet lottocracy” (Guerrero 2024, 212), in which citizens attend adversarial debates without being able to influence one another through discuss—on a model Sutherlandcharacterizes as “Rousseauian.” For critiques of this reading of Rousseau, see Cohen (2010), Pénigaud de Mourgues (2024), and Pettit (2012).

17 On this point, I refer readers to the special issue I co-edited with Hélène Landemore and Antonin Lacelle-Webster, forthcoming in the Journal of Sortition (2026/1).

18 On this point, reference may be made to the plenary debate during the final session of the Citizens’ Convention on Climate, concerning whether the proposals should be submitted to referendums rather than merely engage the government’s responsibility. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rmEvDpg2Bo [retrieved 15/12/2025].

19 For a pessimist overview see Krashinsky and Achen (2024).

20 For a philosophical account, see Estlund (2009b). On how political preferences may challenge loyalty to democratic procedures, see Graham and Svolik (2020). On the psychological or motivational primacy of substance over procedures, see Krishnarajan (2023).

21 Guerrero’s Lottocracy’s introduction is filled with qualifiers (typical of the analytic style): lottocracy “would, or at least might, be an improvement” (5), it “seems undeniable” (14) that microcosmic diversity would lead to better decisions, “the available evidence seems to suggest” that our situation is one of power capture by the rich and the powerful (8). These are too many words just to say “I don’t know.”

22 In fact, the bar is higher than that, but this redirects the inquiry elsewhere. It might concern, for instance, media regulation, the politics of recommendation algorithms or large language models. But the details of this fall outside the scope of this article.

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Théophile Pénigaud de Mourgues, « The Oasis and the Mirage. Lottocracy as a Test for Democratic Theory »Œconomia, 15-4 | 2025, 635-660.

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Théophile Pénigaud de Mourgues, « The Oasis and the Mirage. Lottocracy as a Test for Democratic Theory »Œconomia [En ligne], 15-4 | 2025, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2025, consulté le 17 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/oeconomia/19690 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15eaf

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Théophile Pénigaud de Mourgues

Yale University. theophile.penigaud@yale.edu

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