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Intro
This is an American ballot. With it, you’re free to vote for any candidate you choose to represent you in politics. So long as the candidate raised millions dollars and is running with one of two parties. But, once in office, they can deliver on all their promises. So long as they decide to keep them.
This is American democracy.
It’s strange, comparing it to the original democracy, from 2500 years ago. This is an ancient Greek “ballot” from Athens. With it, you don’t vote for anyone—except yourself, if you want to. There’s no majority decision; just a random draw of a name. And…Blade Petersen has been selected for a seat in Congress. Maybe that’s you.
This is a lottery, and it’s democracy as originally intended: politics without politicians.
But why should anyone take this seriously? Letting random people run the country, really?
Except, why should anyone take this seriously?
In America, public approval of Congress hovers around 15%. Here and in Britain and France, two-thirds of citizens think their governments corrupt. It’s not hard to tell why. Politicians openly engage in insider trading, take bribes they call “campaign finance,” consort with complete monsters, and after office take jobs at big corporations they protected from regulation. [A, ch. 1]
And none of that should surprise us! Aristotle—an ancient Greek philosopher who lived in this political system—literally wrote the book on Politics that gave us the terms like democracy, oligarchy, and monarchy.
And in it he wrote, thousands of years ago, "It is accepted as democratic when public offices are allocated by lottery; and as oligarchic when they are filled by election.” [B, 4.9]
Elections produce an unaccountable, corrupt, and immoral political elite, because they are oligarchic by design, because elections have four big problems: selection bias, cognitive bias, corruption, and—most fatal of all, what James Madison called “the mortal disease” of government—polarization.
Lotteries, on the other hand, well they aren’t just more democratic. They actually work better, because they solve all those problems with four ancient principles: κοινός (koinos), σοφός (sophos), εὔθυνα (euthuna), and ἑνότης (henotes), and I’m going to explain each of them.
But you don’t have to take my word for it. After all, the city that used lotteries, that invented this system, Athens, was one of the richest and most powerful civilizations of its time and produced some of the greatest minds in history: Plato, Socrates, Diogenes, Euripides, Thucydides, the fathers of philosophy, science, drama, and history. Oh, and today two major countries have recently begun using lotteries to reshape how they do politics, and it’s actually working.
So, I’m going to explain how this works, how the ancients used it, and why lottery is so effective. Along the way, I’ll take the arguments against it seriously, and we’ll hear from real participants in today’s modern experiments who went in skeptical or downright angry.
Jules: I thought it was a scam.
Finbarr: At first, I thought I’ll punch him through the window
But who by the end, were completely sold.
Jules: There is a communion of souls. You feel it.
This is the case for a return to lottery: a case for rebuilding politics without politicians.
I. History
Athens
To understand how and why lottery works, we need to look at how the Athenians used it,
Their system, not unlike America’s government today, was sort of organized around three core branches.
The Assembly was a legislature where laws were debated, drafted, and chosen.
But instead of politicians, it was full of whichever citizens showed up, usually some 6,000 people. Now participation was extremely limited by modern standards—no women, and Athens had a vast enslaved population—but Athenian citizenship extended to all free adult males, making Athens more inclusive than even 1800s America.
The Council, meanwhile, functioned like a sort of executive branch, setting the Assembly's agenda and ensuring the implementation of its laws.
But instead of a President, this too was filled by ordinary citizens: 500 of them, randomly selected to serve for one year at a time.
To do that, they used a device like this: the Kleroterion, an ancient lottery machine. Names were inscribed on small ceramic pieces, then inserted into the face. Some numbered or colored balls were then dispensed to determine which names were drawn. And all of this was done in public so everyone could see the system wasn’t being rigged. This is modeled after archaeological findings of kleroteria believed to be used in jury selection, because yes the courts—not unlike our own—randomly selected jurors to preside over cases each day. Except, in Athens, it was random citizens only: no judges allowed.
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This democratic system brought many more Athenians into the fold, gave them a reason to care, and expanded the perspective of the political institutions with the life experiences of merchants, sailors, farmers, laborers, and yes, some wealthy aristocrats. With this democracy, for the next two hundred years, Athens ascended to greatness. At its height, it was a naval superpower, a commercial empire, and the stomping ground of some of the most innovative thinkers in history.
But this system was forgotten, because it ruined the city with faction and infighting. At least, that’s what you’d think if you read what the American founders had to say about Athens…but that never actually happened. Though Athens had its share of civil strife, over two centuries, democracy repeatedly won out and proved remarkably durable. It only fell to an army led by Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander the Great, who went on to conquer 2 million square miles across Asia. Talk about tough luck.
Enlightenment
So, why, then were America’s founders so mistaken about Athenian democracy? Well, for two thousand years after Athens fell, democracy lay dormant, almost forgotten. Until something happened.
In the 1600s, new scientific discoveries and groundbreaking technologies empowered a growing class of wealthy citizens to question the old establishment forces of monarchy and religion. By the late 1700s, this movement reached its peak, when colonists in America rose up against the British crown in a fight for national independence. And when they succeeded, it seemed like lottery and democracy had a chance for a comeback millennia in the making.
But the American founders rejected it. Instead of lottery and democracy, they chose elections and republicanism. From one perspective, this was understandable. Athens was one city. America was spread across 13 states over 1,000 miles. Getting random citizens to and from the capital in the 1700s would have been a nightmare.
But the founders went further, condemning democracy as a faction-riddled mess that would certainly destroy any society where it took root, and in part that’s probably because the American revolution was powered by wealthy farmers, merchants, and lawyers—men of wealth and property. They needed a way to consult the broader population—of property-owning white men—while practically limiting competition for real power to a narrow political elite with the leisure time to spare politicking in Washington, DC.
The best way to do that? Elections.
II. Theory
Preamble
Now, the founders did also make a number of apparently compelling arguments for the advantages of elections. They argued elections were effective at synthesizing and representing diverse interests. They argued elections delegated power to wise, capable men, filtering and refining coarse public opinion. They argued elections provided a system of accountability that would avert corruption and punish poor leadership. And, most importantly, they argued elections would prevent faction and division which, if left unchecked, would result in civil war and social collapse.
They probably believed those arguments, but in the 250 years since then, American history and modern scientific research have proven them wrong. On all four counts—representation, knowledge, trust, and unity—the Ancient Athenian lottery outperformed modern elections.
Representation
Let’s start with representation. The Athenian approach is built on the principle of κοινός (koinos)—meaning common, shared, or ordinary—because this is how Athens treated power.
If you wanted to participate in politics, you needed some free time to attend the Assembly—though a daily stipend for attendees helped—you had to be willing to throw your name in the Kleroterion, and you had to care about your city. Now, this work was seriously demanding of people’s time. It wasn’t easy, but it was fundamentally accessible to every citizen.
Compare that to America. On the one hand, participation is easier. Just show up to vote once every few years, and you’re done. But on the other hand, to make a real impact, to actually participate, it’s incredibly exclusive. Standing for an election means committing to a multi-year project of traveling, glad-handing, self-advertising, and fundraising.
One of these is a lot more inviting to normal people. And one of them is a lot more inviting to nutcases. This is called selection bias.
Only certain kinds of people want to stand in elections or stand any chance of winning them: the charismatic, the beautiful, the confident, the wealthy and well-connected. [A, ch. 2] In turn, voters have only a narrow choice, and elections produce a small, homogeneous political elite that not only looks nothing like the public but thinks nothing like them and frequently cares little about their problems. [A, ch. 3]
Elections merely give people a choice of their preferred member of the elite. That’s why Aristotle called them oligarchic. By contrast, he defined democracy as a regime in which everyone may have a turn at being in power, which is what Athenian lottery achieved. [B, 6.2]
By filling their assemblies with whoever showed up and their public offices and juries with citizens selected by lottery, the Athenians acted like statisticians, producing a representative slice of Athenian society with large, random samples.
By replacing politicians with the people, Athens ensured that politics served the people. It was politics by the people, of the people, for the people — not politics for politicians. And this κοινός (koinos), this superior representation, doesn’t just apply to ancient lottery. Modern lotteries in Ireland have revealed the exact same pattern, which we’ll discuss in just a bit.
Knowledge
But maybe you’re thinking that electoral selection bias is valuable in its own way. Politics is a hard job, and it requires certain skills.
But random samples don’t just make politics more representative. They literally make politics smarter, and I can prove it. This is σοφός (sophos), the wisdom of lottery.
In the early 2000s, Scott Page, a researcher at Cal Tech, found something unexpected. He observed that when faced with a task, given certain conditions, “a randomly selected collection of problem solvers outperforms a collection of the best individual problem solvers.” [J, 2.6] [✱] In other words, a random group is usually better at problem solving than a group of experts. That's a big claim, and his investigation and research are complicated and nuanced. Moreover, there’s a lot of modern cognitive science research that backs this conclusion up. These books and this video by VSauce are great if you want to learn more.
But the simple explanation is this: more talented problem solvers tend to think in similar ways — frequently, they’ve received similar educations at similar elite colleges and lead similar lives. As a result, they’re vulnerable to similar blind spots, and they tend to fall prey to group-think biases.
Does that sound familiar?
On the other hand, groups with diverse cognitive styles — people who think about things in different ways — tend to be more effective because they see things things their peers miss and tend to be more comprehensive in their explorations of solutions.
Cognitive diversity trumps ability. Therefore, politics should seek to replicate cognitive diversity in deliberative decision-making. [A, ch. 5]
And elections don’t achieve this. Elections don’t produce κοινός (koinos). They don’t replicate the cognitive diversity of the public, because they select for a very particular type of individual, about whom voters only get rare opportunities to simply thumb-up or thumb-down. That’s not deliberation.
The Athenian Council, Assembly, and Juries couldn’t be more different. These institutions operated like a city in microcosm: with a share of large landowners and brash, wealthy businessman, yes, but also artisans and day laborers, sailors and subsistence farmers, all of them with their own knowledge, expertise, experience, perspectives, and distinct approaches to problem solving. And here, citizens got into the nitty-gritty details of politics, crafted policies through hours of conversation and argument, and spent a lifetime learning to deliberate and govern.
By achieving κοινός (koinos)—or representation—through random sampling, Athens also achieved σοφός (sophos)—superior political intelligence through cognitive diversity. And this virtue isn’t just limited to ancient Athens. Just a few years ago, as we’ll see shortly, a lottery-selected body in France solved a major problem that had stumped politicians for years.
Trust
Except, there’s just one problem. This diversity trumps ability theorem assumes everyone is actually working toward the same goal. But what if some of these random citizens are selfish or badly motivated? At least with elections, there’s some public scrutiny. We know who holds office and we can choose not to elect them again if they become corrupt.
But remember, elections actually prioritize selfish and ambitious people. And, as for elections preventing corruption, well how’s that’s working out? No, here too lottery has the advantage, and it’s called εὔθυνα (euthuna) — the examination.
Before taking office, every person selected by lottery in Athens was subjected to an intensive public audit assessing not his competence but his character and integrity. If enough citizens came forward to complain about someone, he’d actually be passed over. (G, 375-376) But if they passed, after their single year term, they were then examined again, compelled to report on their time in office and show how they used public funds during their term. Failure of an audit resulted in a severe fine, or worse. And at the head of every εὔθυνα (euthuna) were, again, ordinary citizens.
Accountability in Athens wasn’t institutionalized. It was socialized: every citizen checking each other. In America, by contrast, a byzantine system of ethics watchdogs, inspectors general, and congressional oversight committees—far removed from public scrutiny—sit contentedly alongside campaign finance, lobbying, corporate revolving doors, congressional stock trading, and life-serving career politicians who keep doing corrupt shit until the day they drop dead: all of which, if ordinary people had a say, would be outlawed and punished tomorrow.
Love
So, κοινός (koinos), σοφός (sophos), εὔθυνα (euthuna). The American founders said elections were the key to representative government, to intelligent and capable government, and to accountable government. But on each count, they were wrong to discount the ancient wisdom of the old Athenian lottery.
Yet there was one last issue they thought more important than any of these.
Faction, also known as division or polarization. In one of the most-cited defenses of the American Constitution, James Madison called faction “the mortal disease under which popular governments have everywhere perished,” for which "Democracy…can admit of no cure.” Elections, on the other hand, he called “the cure.” [E, C]
Now, the US is still standing, so elections haven’t been a complete failure, but we did fight a horrible Civil War less than a hundred years after Madison’s essay. And today, America is deeply polarized.
Enter, the fourth and most crucial virtue of lottery: ἑνότης (henotes) — unity.
Imagine that you've just been selected for the Athenian Council. Now, Athens was tiny by modern standards—maybe 30,000 adult male citizens—but even so, no one person could possibly have known everyone else.
A year-long appointment to an intensely demanding job with total strangers may sound like a recipe for disaster, but think of the bonds that it would build. Then add to that occasional attendance of the Assembly, alongside thousands more fellow citizens. Then multiply all of that, year over year, for a lifetime. Think of the civic pride and spirit.
Compare that to American elections, where politicians are sorted into political teams before they even take office. Madison was dead wrong. Elections force us into faction, to join opposing teams, to cheer for each other’s defeat.
Trump: “I hate my opponent. I don’t want the best for them”
Lottery and public assemblies force us to work together.
But it’s not just a thought experiment. For nearly 250 years, despite repeated coups by oligarchs and foreign invasions, time after time the Athenians restored the democratic system. [F, ch. 6, 8, 10] And this ἑνότης (henotes) still shines through today in modern experiments with lottery. So let’s take a look at those stories and learn how Ireland and France took the ancient wisdom of κοινός (koinos), σοφός (sophos), εὔθυνα (euthuna), and ἑνότης (henotes) and applied them to our modern world.
III. Practice
Ireland
First, let’s look at Ireland.
Between 2013 and 2014, 100 random Irish citizens—two-thirds ordinary people and one-third politicians—were selected to form a Constitutional Convention to tackle a handful of issues that were gridlocking the country’s parliament. And when it started, ἑνότης (henotes) was nowhere to be found.
Finbarr: At first, I thought I’ll punch him through the window.
That’s Finbarr O’Brien describing his first encounter with one of his fellow convention participants, an openly gay man named Chris Lyons. One look at him, and Finbarr was filled with hate.
You see, one of the issues the Convention had to resolve was the question of gay marriage, a contentious topic in this deeply Catholic country.
Yet Finbarr didn’t attack Chris, and he didn’t leave. Over ten weekends, he joined the group deliberations, frequently voicing his opposition. That is, until toward the end, when he stood up to share something he hadn’t told anyone.
When he was a child, Finbarr explained, he’d been sexually abused by an older man. For decades, he’d hated gay men. But over the course of the Convention, he’d realized that the people he thought were his enemies were rather a lot like him. He’d changed his mind. [I]
In the end, the Convention, including Finbarr, recommended that same-sex marriage be legalized in Ireland.
Not only did this Convention prove the incredible power of ἑνότης (henotes), of unity, in democratic lottery, this decision proved its κοινός (koinos) and σοφός (sophos). Where politicians had been gridlocked for years, the Convention broke through and represented the public will. Put to a referendum, the Convention’s recommendation was approvedby 62% of voters. [H]
Since then, Ireland has continued to form new Conventions by lottery: these filled 100% with ordinary citizens. And they’ve continued to succeed where politicians fail, tackling tough issues that are hard to solve with electoral horse races. The next Convention, discussing abortion, recommended reforms that passed in a referendum with a historic-high 66% of the vote. [A, ch. 4]
France
But Ireland isn’t alone. France has also begun experimenting with lottery.
In early 2019, when massive protests against a proposed carbon tax plunged the country into chaos, President Macron spent three months touring the country to hear people’s concerns. And at the end…nothing happened. Macron — citing experts — insisted that the carbon tax was simply the only way.
So the protests continued, and when some academics approached Macron with the idea of a lottery, he was desperate enough to sign off. Then, when the 150 randomly-selected citizens convened in Paris to form the Citizens’ Convention on Climate Change,
Macron promised them that their recommendations would be applied to law or referendum “without filter.” [A, ch. 6] But some participants were unsure of the whole thing.
Jules: I thought it was a scam. [A, ch. 7]
That’s Jules, one of the 150. When he arrived, Jules was a skeptic of climate change, and of the whole lottery business. On day one, he refused to check his luggage at the door of the convention, swearing he was just about to leave at any minute. [A, ch. 7]
But Jules stayed, and though he never changed his mind on climate change, he found a sense of belonging, a sort of civic family in the Convention.
Jules: There are a lot of members who love me very much and whom I love very much… There is a communion of souls. You feel it. [A, ch. 7]
This is, yet again, lottery proving its power of ἑνότης (henotes), of unity. But the Convention proved more than that. It proved lottery’s σοφός (sophos) — its power of collective wisdom — and its εὔθυνα (euthuna) — its accountability.
Repeatedly, in the face of enormous protests, political elites — backed up by experts — swore up and down that a carbon tax, despite massive outrage, was the only way. But in the end, the Citizens’ Convention produced 149 proposals to address climate change — not one of them using a carbon tax.
And afterward, French politicians doubled down on their duplicity by refusing to apply the convention’s recommendations to law or to a referendum, like they promised.
Now, eventually, public outrage compelled French politicians to pass some of the Convention’s proposals, producing the most ambitious climate legislation in French history. Unfortunately, this means the Convention has been less successful than one would have hoped, though not because lottery failed but because politicians obstructed the people’s accomplishments.
IV. Conclusion
Randomly selected ordinary citizens aren’t just more representative than politicians. They aren’t just more intelligent than politicians. They aren’t just more accountable than politicians. Ordinary citizens care more than politicians—about each other, about their communities, and about doing the right thing.
So how could we apply lottery today, how can we conjure the forces of κοινός (koinos), σοφός (sophos), εὔθυνα (euthuna), and ἑνότης (henotes) to improve our politics?
Unfortunately, France shows just how limited the impact of reforms can be if applied in half-measures. Athenian lottery worked because it defined the shape of the citizen’s life. We, on the other hand, have forgotten how to be political animals. For lottery democracy to work, the average American should expect at least once, if not more than once, in his or her life, to be called to serve at some level of government. That would mean lotteries, assemblies, councils at every level: from the national all the way down to the local.
That is…ambitious. And in truth, lottery probably can’t solve all our problems. No one change ever can. Nor do we really know exactly what would happen if we went full bore on it tomorrow. So even if we can’t—or maybe shouldn’t—replace all our elections with powerballs tomorrow, we do know a few things. We know that elections have real oligarchic tendencies we need to take seriously if we want to restore any public faith in popular government. We know that the founders were wrong to write lottery off completely. We know that lottery has some real virtues. And we know that in countries that have tried it recently, this ancient method has proven just as effective as it was 2500 years ago.
Post-Script
If you want to learn more about lottery, read this book, by Yale political scientist Hélène Landemore, published just this February: Politics Without Politicians. And in the meantime, if you want to support our efforts to tell more stories that matter to democracy, consider becoming a YouTube or Patreon member for some exclusive content, grabbing some merch like this shirt, poster, or coffee mug, or by patronizing our sponsor, DeleteMe. It’s a great way to stay safe on the internet, and every signup supports the channel. And as always, thanks for watching.
Sources & Notes
✱ The necessary conditions, according to Page: “These four conditions—the problem has to be hard, the people have to be smart, the people have to be diverse, and the group size has to be bigger than a handful and chosen from a large population—prove sufficient for diversity to trump ability. They’re not the only conditions under which the result holds, but if they’re satisfied, diversity trumps ability.”
A. Hélène Landemore. Politics without Politicians. Penguin, 2026.
B. Aristotle. Politics. Aristotle, 350BC.
C. James Madison. “The Federalist Papers No. 10.” Yale Law School. Lillian Goldman Law Library, November 23, 1787. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed10.asp.
E. Ira Lupu. “The Most-Cited Federalist Papers,” n.d. https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1428&context=concomm.
F. Donald Kagan. The Fall of the Athenian Empire. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992.
G. Martin Oswald, “Public Expense: Whose Obligation? Athens 600-454 B. C. E.”
H. Citizens’ Assembly. “2013-2014 Convention on the Constitution | Citizens’ Assembly,” September 4, 2024. https://citizensassembly.ie/previous-assemblies/2013-2014-convention-on-the-constitution/.
I. Bastian Berbner. “Unlikely Friendship.” Pacegallery.com, 2020. https://www.pacegallery.com/journal/unlikely-friendship-helped-legalize-same-sex-marriage-ireland/.
J. Scott E Page. The Difference. Princeton, N.J. ; Woodstock: Princeton University Press, 2007.
K. Josiah Ober. The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece. Verlag: Princeton University Press, 2015.
L. Ober, Josiah. Democracy and Knowledge Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens. Princeton University Press, 2008.
M. Hugo Mercier, and Dan Sperber. The Enigma of Reason. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2017.
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