Why Can’t Lottocrats and Their Critics Communicate?
In “The Lottocratic Mentality and Lottocracy: Talking Past One Another?” I reviewed two recently published books on sortition, Lottocracy by Alexander Guerrero and The Lottocratic Mentality by Christina Lafont and Nadia Urbinati. One of the many reasons why these books are particularly apt to be reviewed together is that their authors, Guerrero and Lafont, in 2021 won the American Philosophical Association’s Leibowitz Prize, for their dialogue with each other about lottocracy. Guerrero’s book and Lafont and Urbinati’s book were both prepared presumptively in the context of their extended contact with each other about the topics on which they wrote. Guerrero’s book, Lottocracy, was published in 2021, and in the introduction to his book he thanks Lafont for her extended engagement with his work, and says that he looks forward to reading her future book, co-authored with Urbinati, raising objections to lottocracy. That book, The Lottocratic Mentality, published three years later in 2024, likewise in the introduction thanks Guerrero for access to his book prior to its publication, and promises to engage with the ideas of his book at length in what follows.
It is striking then that these books have little to say about the arguments that are made by the other. In “The Lottocratic Mentality and Lottocracy: Talking Past One Another?”, I go over the areas where these authors discuss the same topics but where their arguments simply do not meet.
The most notable omitted point of contact concerns an argument from Guerrero that is in many ways the centrepiece of his book: that elected representatives rely on accountability to the public for both their efficacy at promoting the public interest, and their legitimacy, and that meaningful accountability of representatives to their constituents is impossible. Guerrero argues that modern political issues are far too complex and opaque for citizens to monitor their representatives effectively.
The Lottocratic Mentality makes its case for electoral democracy in a way that depends deeply on the idea that elected legislators are meaningfully accountable to those they represent, and so for its success depends on demonstrating that Guerrero’s accountability argument fails. But it has almost nothing to say in response to this accountability argument. While they acknowledge that meaningful accountability is ‘very difficult’ under electoral democracy, they argue that the lack of accountability and its attendant problems is even worse for lottocracy. This does not grapple with the fatal nature of Guerrero’s argument - if the legitimacy of electoral democracy depends on its accountability, and it is not accountable, then it is not legitimate, regardless of whatever problems lottocratic democracy might have. Nor does it grapple with Guerrero’s contention that accountability is only instrumentally valuable for achieving responsiveness and that lottocracy can be responsive without being accountable.
This kind of problem is emblematic of what I perceive as a general mis-match between the arguments made by lottocracy and those made by its critics. In general, lottocrats are interested in arguing that lottocray has epistemic qualities that make it excellent for promoting the public interest. They tend to be written in a way that would appeal to epistemic democrats, whether the authors identify with that label themselves or not. By contrast critics of lottocracy tend to argue that irrespective of these epistemic claims lottocracy is illegitimate because it is not procedurally democratic. Arguments of these kinds do not naturally have much to say in response to one another.
Reader, do you agree that this is the general shape of the debate? If so, why do you think that is? If not, why do you suppose that lottocrats and their critics so often seem to be talking past one another?
Responses (5)
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Without taking either (epistemic or proceduralist) side in this debate, if (as Erik Shoemaker claims) three self-styled deliberative democrats are talking past each other, what hope is there for the broader deliberative democracy project? The Habermasian assumption is that deliberative exchange will enable the participants to update their own beliefs and preferences, but that doesn't appear to be happening in this case. I'm puzzled by Helene Landemore's appeal to the (Mercier/Sperber) Argumentative Theory of Reasoning to support her case for deliberative democracy, as the theory would suggest that the act of performing speech acts (or writing a book) advocating a position (say, Lottocracy or Anti-Lottocracy) would enhance the confirmation bias and other cognitive traits that would make it harder to moderate one's position. If this is the case then it is down to the audience, who have no cognitive investment one way or the other (a jury, or in this case readers) to come to their own conclusions. We would be better advised to adopt Andrew Dobson's advice to start Listening for Democracy, rather than focusing on ideal (and unobtainable) deliberative norms like the ideal speech situation.
ReplyThanks, Eric, for this helpful joint review. I agree with Eric that Lafont and Urbinati often do not engage precisely or directly with the actual ideas and arguments in my book. This is somewhat frustrating, given that I sent them my full nearly final book manuscript in November 2022 (after I had sent it to OUP) and the final proofs (to enable correct page citation, if appropriate) in July 2024. They have targets in mind other than just me, I believe, which is fair enough. But I appreciate Eric highlighting the many ways in which they don't really engage specifically with either my work or Landemore's work, even when supposedly engaging the "radical lottocrats" (of which we are two of a very small number). I don't appreciate the suggestion that I have failed to engage with Lafont and Urbinati, however. I have had several productive in person discussions with both of them after the completion of my book, and the Leibowitz Prize was a lovely event. But I did not see any of their book manuscript prior to my book being sent off to the press (hence my reference to reading their work in the future in my book). How am I supposed to engage with something that I haven't seen and which isn't published, and which at any rate is being written after my book has been sent off to the press? And I do engage at great, detailed length with Lafont's work on sortition/lottocracy from her earlier Democracy without Shortcuts in my book, spending a full eight pages of my book (pp. 344-352) presenting, interpreting, and responding to her central concerns about "blind deference" and sortition/lottocracy. I was a little surprised that given the 'failure to engage' charge leveled against me that this long, detailed discussion of Lafont and Lafont's objection receives no mention in Eric's piece. All of that said, I continue to be very optimistic about these discussions, as ideas are developed, presented, engaged, and refined. When we miss a point or fail to engage with an argument, it is helpful to be called on it, so that we can attend to it and say something about it going forward. There are a lot of ideas, systems, and arguments being developed in a relatively short span of time, and it is easy to miss things, or to assume that someone has seen something when they have not. I do my very best to engage precisely and specifically with the arguments and ideas put forward by others, but of course not everyone will agree with where I and others come out on these issues. But over time I think the scholarly community does well at drawing attention to places where this or that point might have been overlooked. And I know that a long book such as my own might take some time before people have a chance to work through it carefully. For those interested, over the coming year I plan to write a series of responses to all of the many arguments that have been raised against lottocracy in general and my specific ideas and arguments in particular, and I will post about those here when appropriate. Thanks to Keith and others for their work in creating and convening this journal and this space for the productive discussion of sortition and related ideas.
ReplyOn a more substantive note, I will say that I think the suggestion that lottocrats are focused on epistemic/instrumental arguments and their opponents are focused on procedural arguments seems to me a mischaracterization. First, everyone who embraces the use of representatives in a democratic system has already embraced an epistemic/instrumental argument. (These can be more or less elitist--just a matter of how much time and focus it takes and the need for division of labor and a full time job, or trying to select the 'best and brightest' to 'refine and enlarge' the opinions of the masses via electoral choice.) The defense of the use of representatives is almost entirely instrumental, as it quite clearly introduces concerns about dramatic inequality of political power (with a very small few having almost all of the political power), distortion/bias in selection of representatives (with a few socioeconomic elites having much more power to influence elections), and concerns about domination by an elite political class. Most critics of lottocracy seem to write as if they are discussing direct democracy as the alternative system, but of course representative democracy is ascendant and dominant everywhere. (Most critics of lottocracy ignore this 'fact of representatives' and the complications it creates for their (largely implicit) ideas about procedural democracy, enabling them to write romantically about equality of political power under our current system and other fantasies of this kind.) Given that everyone has accepted the use of representatives on instrumental/epistemic grounds, the two central questions then, are: (1) what is the best way to select and use representatives, given instrumental considerations; and (2) are there procedural or non-instrumental considerations that limit the kinds of answers that we can give in (1)? In my book, a significant part of the overall argument for lottocracy focuses on (1), suggesting that under modern political conditions we should expect my version of lottocracy to do better than current modern electoral representative democracy at what I call sensibility. That's a long, detailed, multi-pronged argument. But it is very much not the whole story. The other part of the argument for lottocracy in the book spends a great deal of time considering non-instrumental, "procedural" issues such as equality/fairness, rights of political participation, concerns about responsiveness and "accountability," and overall ideas about what makes a political system democratic and what makes a political system legitimate. I offer detailed non-instrumental accounts of both democracy and legitimacy in Chapters 15 and 16 of the book, and I argue that on those accounts, lottocracy does just as well if not better than electoral representative democracy. Critics of lottocracy have mostly failed to engage with my (or others) accounts of democracy and legitimacy, and failed to offer their own accounts of democracy and legitimacy and other non-instrumental, procedural considerations. In my view, there is a lot of assuming the status quo is procedurally fine, and that all departures from it are not, but in a way that is just straightforwardly question-begging against non-electoral systems, and not independently attractive or well motivated. At any rate, for those interested in seeing an extensive discussion of non-instrumental, procedural questions, I would encourage people to look at the long Chapters 15 and 16 of my book. Happy to send them to anyone who emails me.
ReplySo I'm still in the act of catching up at the moment. I have not read Lafont's newest book, though I have read Democraacy Without Shortcuts. I'm near the end of Lottocracy, on section 15.5, and have just recently gotten through at least some engagement with Lafont. I have heard other critiques of Lafont's work from Bouricius, Fishkin, and Shoemaker, and each critique I've seen so far feels like it interprets Lafont a bit differently than I have, and I wonder if that is simply due to the fact I've only engaged with the one slice of her work, or if there is something of a misalignment in the arguments. However, Lafont does not come across as defending reprsentative elctoralism, as it stands today. In Democracy without Shortcuts, she explicitly argues that legitimacy cannot come from majoritarian approval in a parliament, but must come from a strong connection between the people themselves, and the laws in which are being produced. From my interpretation, she has much to critisize about the failings of modern democracy in this way, and would support many kinds of reforms to improve things, but that a lottocracy moves in the wrong direction. From this interpretation, arguments that compare lottocratic systems to how democracy operates today are missing the point, as she does not defend how democracy operates today,. Rather, she presents the direction in which she would like it to go. I'm not entirely show the shape her democracy would take, and that certainly is a fair critique (one that Fishkin points out in Can Deliberation Cure the Ills of Democracy), but that doesn't take away from the kind of argument she is making. The problem with a lottocratic system is that, in a sense, the decisions made will often end up being *too good*, as they won't match the views of an ill-informed, nondeliberative populace. Even if the decisions will perform better on both a moral and an epistemic level, producing sensible choices, if they do not align with the general population, they may struggle to accept those outcomes as valid. For Lafont, instead of improving the decisions made by legislators, we need to improve the consideration by the general public. I do believe there exists ways in which we can have it both ways, making use of sortition to extract the epistemic and moral improvements over electoral representation, while still respecting that need for alignment. I feel as though I find myself falling into both camps. Alex, I have been enjoying your book quite a bit, and I think you have a lot of really strong ideas presented. I look forwards to completing the final two sections and hope it won't take me much longer.
ReplyThe argument between electoralists and lottocrats could be viewed in a historical context. In Active and Passive Citizens (2024) Richard Tuck identifies two theories of democracy – radical and representative. He traces the former back to Hobbes’s De Cive and its further development in Rousseau, Marx, the Paris Commune and contemporary populism, It’s no coincidence that sortitionists share the rhetoric of populist critiques of ruling elites – both from the left and the right -- the principal difference being over whether the people should rule by referendum or by lottocracy. Tuck identifies the second tradition of democratic theory as representationalism, associated with the work of Abbé Sieyès, Kelsen, Schumpeter, Lippmann and Lefort. According to these theorists voters choose their representatives and then leave them to govern. Jordan Rose’s JoS paper Electoral Lottocracy proposes a hybrid of these two traditions – voters should choose their representatives, but their power is limited to making proposals, which will then be subject to the informed judgment of a large randomly selected minidemos. https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/imp/jos/pre-prints/content-impjos9
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