NDPR Alexander Guerrero Lottocracy: Democracy Without Elections

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Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2026.04.2 View this Review Online View Other NDPR Reviews

Alexander Guerrero, Lottocracy: Democracy Without Elections, Oxford University Press, 2024, 464pp., $45.00 (pbk) ISBN 9780198938989.

Reviewed by Amanda Greene, University of California Santa Barbara

Many scholars working on democracy today draw our attention only to its upsides or its downsides—the dream or the nightmare. But Alexander Guerrero’s Lottocracy: Democracy without Elections is an admirable exception. While he recognizes that the positive and negative potentials of democracy are intimately related, he gives us reason to hope that we can avoid the worst. His analysis unfolds in two parts. The first part diagnoses the failures of electoral democracy, and the second defends an alternative in which randomly selected citizens are empowered to make political decisions. As he envisions it, such a system would be composed of 20...