METHOD

Demarchy

Proposed flag of demarchy – Credit: Oliver Milne

Wiki Contributor History

July 7, 2026	dorata_correspondence
May 1, 2019	Jaskiran Gakhal, Participedia Team
June 25, 2018	Lucy J Parry, Participedia Team
February 12, 2018	Paul Nollen

Method Data

Face-to-Face, Online, or Both?: Both

General Type of Method: Planning; Public budgeting; Direct democracy

Spectrum of Public Participation: Empower

Links: http://tinyurl.com/y5xbw3q4; https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-007-5998-5_6

Open to All or Limited to Some?: Open to All

Recruitment Method for Limited Subset of Population: Random Sample

Types of Interaction Among Participants: Discussion, Dialogue, or Deliberation; Formal Testimony; Negotiation & Bargaining

Facilitation: No

Level of Polarization This Method Can Handle: Polarized

Level of Complexity This Method Can Handle: Very High Complexity

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Demarchy is a political and economic system involving distribution of coercive and economic power among an open plurality of bodies headed by juries of randomly-selected citizens, with good-faith coordination between those juries obviating the need for state sovereignty.

Problems and Purpose

Demarchy is a form of stateless socialism proposed by Australian philosopher John Burnheim, in which property and coercive power is distributed among an open plurality of jury trusts. These are organisations headed by regularly rotating boards of randomly selected decision makers who have been selected by sortition (lot) from a broadly inclusive pool of eligible citizens (probably overseeing the work of a permanent professional management). Disputes between these bodies, along with criminal and civil complaints, are resolved by courts in which randomly-selected juries on the common-law model hold the power to determine both questions of law and questions of fact, with appeals heard by similar courts with juries drawn from a wider geographical area. This arrangement means there is no central state; instead, civil peace, service provision, and economic coordination is achieved through the goodwill of the juries at the heads of the trusts - a uniquely sortitional affordance, as no other method of appointment could detach the interests of an organisation's leadership from those of the organisation or of their own power structures.

Demarchy is not to be confused with lottocracy, a proposed political system which places supreme power in the hands of allotted citizens within a more traditional state structure.

Demarchy is intended to address problems with capitalist and traditional socialist economic and political models, accepting both socialist critiques of capitalism and liberal critiques of state power. Unlike an open market of capitalist firms, an economy comprised solely of demarchic jury trusts is capable of coordinating voluntarily in the public interest and against the interests of individual firms and whole sectors, because the trustees, being randomly-selected citizens, are not invested in the growth or even survival of their trusts over and above the public good more generally. Thus in a demarchic world economy, fossil fuel trusts could be expected to spontaneously wind themselves down in order to address climate change.

But unlike a state-run economy, there is no central directing function that can be captured or corrupted. The open plurality of trusts means there are many independent sources of capital, and sectors in which existing trusts are failing are open to new entrants, much as in a free market system. This allows the system to constantly renew itself, but also deprives any actor of the ability to impose political control on the citizens by limiting access to employment or services. The random appointment and regular rotation of the trustees, meanwhile, prevents the formation of a privileged nomenklatura class as seen in the socialist powers of the 20th and 21st centuries.

A related method is Civic Lottery.

Origins and Development

Demarchy was originally theorised by John Burnheim in his 1981 paper 'Statistical Democracy: an Alternative to Democratic Centralism and Communalism', and developed further in his 1985 book 'Is Democracy Possible?'. Burnheim's work was a strong influence on the lottocratic socialism advocated by Cockshott and Cottrell in Towards a New Socialism (1993). The anti-statist radicalism of his proposals has, however, been neglected.