In recent years there has been great interest in new forms of citizen participation such as
citizens' assemblies or deliberative polls that involve ordinary citizens in political
decision-making. Many see these innovations as the best solution to the current crisis of
democracy. The most radical among them propose replacing elections with the random selection of
ordinary citizens transforming electoral democracy into a lottocracy. These developments are
driven by a lottocratic mentality that is deeply transforming our understanding of democracy
political equality representation and more. In The Lottocratic Mentality Lafont and
Urbinati focus on this way of thinking which is flourishing in public debates inspiring the
organization of citizens' assemblies worldwide and bridging democratic and nondemocratic
regimes in the vision of a unified global order based on problem-solving allotted assemblies
free from electoral competition. The authors' analysis shows that it amounts to a worrisome
form of technopopulism that justifies conferring legislative power on randomly selected
assemblies based on a mixture of populist and technocratic grounds. This lottocratic mentality
legitimizes the anti-democratic idea that the many should be "ruled" by "the few" chosen by
chance. Against this view they show how lottery-based institutions could be used with the
democratic aim of empowering the citizenry but only if the lottocratic mentality is rejected.
