Alexander Guerrero, PhD, JD, will consider how failures in modern-day electoral representative government can be avoided in an alternative system – one that uses lotteries, not elections, to select officials.

Guerrero argues that by avoiding campaign fundraising, the “lottocratic system” promises to prevent corruption in the selection of representatives. Chosen randomly, officials in the lottocratic system also promise to be more responsive by being more ideologically, demographically and socioeconomically representative than those in current electoral systems. In his free and public talk, Guerrero will discuss the merits, pitfalls and feasibility of lottocratic representative systems. 

Guerrero is a philosophy and medical ethics professor at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include political philosophy, ethics (including applied, bioethics and metaethics), philosophy of law and epistemology.

This event marks the sixth of nine events in the McConnell Center’s “Debating America” lecture series.