A recent guest essay in the New York Times, “The Worst People Run for Office. It’s Time for a Better Way” made a seemingly radical suggestion—improve our democracy by doing away with elections and choosing our leaders randomly.
Could this actually work?
Two kinds of evidence speak to that question: experience and experiments.
Dr. Sandra Peart
Although not many examples of randomized leadership exist, it has been tried and found effective. Many leaders in ancient Athens chosen by lot were deemed capable. Juries offer another example, one that provides both historical and contemporary context. While the final selection of jurors ensures that they have characteristics that make them suitable to the task at hand, lawyers build juries from randomly created pools of jurors. Jurors exercise a form of democratic leadership and generally do so very effectively.
Leadership has been explored in experiments that use public goods games in which participants have the option of contributing to a public vs. a private account. Individual players keep the returns that are private, while the group shares the public returns. The “common good” in this set-up is unambiguous—it is simply the outcome that maximizes total group earnings, which occurs when all players contribute the maximum to the public account. Yet it doesn’t always emerge because it is in the interest of individual participants to “free ride” off of others and stick their money in their private account, while it is in the interest of the group as a whole to have all participants contribute to the public account.
What might leadership look like in this situation?
