Lottocratic Candidate Selection

In The Lottocratic Mentality, Cristina Lafont and Nadia Urbinati claim that random selection of representatives undermines political equality. They argue that radical proposals to either replace or constrain legislatures selected by the vote by assemblies selected by sortition are antithetical to democracy. We agree with Lafont and Urbinati that constraining assemblies selected by the vote with sorted institutions is problematic. In this article, however, we argue it is possible to address the concerns lottocrats have with substantive political inequalities in a way that uses random selection but does not replace or constrain legislatures selected by the vote. We suggest legislative representatives should be elected by the vote, but the candidates up for election should be randomly selected. We argue that we can retain the advantages of sortition if political parties randomly select the candidates they support for election from the party’s membership base. We also consider a more centralized proposal to randomly select a nationwide pool of electoral candidates.