What Do Mini‐Publics Prove? - Kogelmann - Philosophy & Public Affairs - Wiley Online Library
Use the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more. Lottocracy is a novel political arrangement that replaces elected politicians with ordinary citizens selected at random. It is unlike any political system that currently exists, so it is natural to have anxiety about how it would work in practice. To mollify these concerns, many lottocrats point to the successful performance of mini-publics as evidence that lottocracy would work well, if tried. This inference resembles a claim about external validity, I argue, and develop a framework for evaluating it by relying on work from the social sciences and philosophy of science about when such claims are warranted. With this framework in hand, I show that mini-publics teach us little about how lottocracy would work in practice, although the strength of this conclusion depends on which specific version of lottocracy is under consideration. Mini-publics, however, do provide evidence abou