Democrats, Epistocrats, and the Enfranchisement Lottery
Democrats, Epistocrats, and the Enfranchisement
Lottery
CLAUDIO LÓPEZ-GUERRA*
ABSTRACT
This article defends the enfranchisement lottery—a novel alternative to uni-
versal suffrage—against two types of challenges. Some political theorists have
recently advanced arguments for traditional democratic institutions that suggest
the impermissibility of the enfranchisement lottery as a method for constituting
the electorate. On the other hand, epistocrats sympathetic to the idea of creat-
ing a more competent electorate have argued that the enfranchisement lottery
might not be the best device to that end. Against both of these positions, the arti-
cle contents that the enfranchisement lottery currently stands as an undefeated
option to allocate the legal right to vote.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 774
II. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 774
III. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 775
A. Social Equality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 776
B. Epistemic Equality. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 777
C. Mass Participation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 778
1. Mass Elections and Democracy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 779
2. Civic Engagement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 779
IV. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 781
CONCLUSION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 786
* Associate Professor of Political Science and PPEL (Philosophy, Politics, Economics and Law) at
the University of Richmond. © 2021, Claudio López-Guerra. I am grateful to Sahar Akhtar, Jason
Brennan, and the participants in the Symposium on the Ethics of Democracy at Georgetown University
(November, 2019) for their valuable comments.
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