Is democracy salvageable without its most iconic institution: elections? In this tightly argued and provocatively detailed volume, Alexander Guerrero proposes a radical transformation of democratic governance: eschewing elections in favor of random selection. His proposal, termed lottocracy, is not an idealist thought experiment but a full-fledged institutional model designed to address what he sees as the systemic collapse of electoral representation in modern societies.

The first half of the book (chapters 1–7) offers a comprehensive critique of electoral democracy's performance in epistemic, communicative, and agential terms. Guerrero marshals insights from political theory, media studies, and empirical research to demonstrate how elections incentivize manipulation, reward charisma over competence, and entrench elite dominance. Under conditions of scale and complexity, elections no longer promote accountability or deliberation. Instead, they amplify misinformation, spectacle, and voter alienation (83–115). Particularly striking is the analysis of how media systems distort the epistemic environment through algorithmic sorting and emotional polarization (chapter 3), undermining the cognitive conditions necessary for informed citizenship (97–123).

In response, Guerrero introduces the architecture of lottocracy in the bo