Imagine if instead of congress or parliament, a country elected it's representitives randomly from the set of people who put themselves up as candidates? It would statistically be representative of the population.

No more need to vote.

No more need for candidates to campaign.

No more representatives working to get re-elected instead of doing what they felt was the right thing.

No more political parties.

Fewer backroom deals.

This can be tweaked if you feel rich people are better people: You could allow candidates to buy additional draws, perhaps which each additional draw being more expensive than the last to moderate it somewhat.

Athens used to do this. It is called "sortition".

There is a Journal of Public Decision Making that has some really interesting ideas of how to make better countries. Of course, almost none of it is ever put to use, because current countries are captured by powerful special interest groups and insiders, who as the winners don't want anything to change that would risk their power. So these kinds of changes can only happen when a new form of government arises out of a revolution. And revolutions are less and less likely given how those in power are watching people closer and closer.

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This would be great. I’d love it if we went another step further too. If every person got to choose which services they did or didn’t pay for. Want to send money to Ukraine? Great. Support the hungry? Not buy F-35s? Great. Assuming humans can be cool, we could then also do away with having the majority be the overlords of the minority.

Democracy theorists have been thinking about this for a long time. Technically, electing representatives through lotteries is still completely democratic.

Democracy just means that everyone has equal political rights and equal political franchise. A random lottery still fits this definition!

The arguments for it are reasonably compelling. Trial juries are often cited as an example of how randomly selected citizens do a much better job at making dispassionate decisions than self-selected groups are.

"No more political parties"

Imagine the impact that would have on the media, both corporate and social

And on the inane culture wars

It would be an untried system so of course the unknown unknowns

But the sheer power to solve 90% of political dysfunction in one fell swoop

Why have I never heard this idea discussed before?

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