Demographic Tokenism in Lottocracy

Many democratic theorists want to replace electoral democracy with sortition or lottery‐based political systems, in which at most a small number of lottery‐selected citizens will be appointed to exercise political power. They claim one virtue of these systems is that they tend to ensure demographic proportionality, while electoral democracy, they claim, has uneven demographic turnout in voting and even more uneven demographic results in elections. Lottocrat propose to disenfranchise nearly all citizens, but claim, no matter, citizens can be assured that someone demographically like them will hold power. This paper argues that there is something morally problematic about treating individual citizens as tokens of their demographic groups, even if, empirically speaking, demographics have great predictive power about how people vote or what political outcomes they prefer.