Government By Lottery

One thing that occurs to me on this jury duty day is that I think there’s a decent case to be made that we ought to rely on lotteries more as a tool of governance. There’s an obvious appeal to something like town meeting direct democracy, but also some obvious logistical problems with it. The main alternative we’ve come up with is representative democracy, where you vote for some folks to serve as a legislature on your behalf. This has a lot of virtues and I by no means think can or should be dispensed with entirely. But it also does have its limits and problems, and isn’t in any obvious way “fairer” than selecting representatives at random.

There seem to me to be plenty of municipalities across America that are too big for town meetings, but still sufficiently rinky dink that they don’t want full time professional legislatures. Many of these places already use a council-manager system of government where the idea is for day-to-day running of the city to be in the hands of a hired professional team, with the legislature just serving as a kind of generic check and authorizing tool. In those cases, wouldn’t a legislature chosen by lottery make a certain amount of sense? The city manager would basically run the city, and the council wouldn’t do much other than approve budgets and if necessary fire the manager and hire a new one. It seems to me that it would work fine, and be actually fairer and more democratic than the current practice.

I suppose this is a solution in search of a problem, but America in general seems to me to suffer from a kind of weird elections-mania and I’m always looking for opportunities to serve democratic values without all this constant proliferation of campaigning.