demarchy
demarchy noun: government by decision-makers who have been randomly selected by sortition (lot) from a pool of eligible citizens.
Noun
demarchy (countable and uncountable, plural demarchies)
- Government by decision-makers who have been randomly selected by sortition (lot) from a pool of eligible citizens.
- In his recent book Is Democracy Possible? (1985) John Burnheim advocates a system that he calls ‘demarchy’, with striking resemblances to classical democracy. […] This is more significant for demarchies administering manufacturing processes, but would affect them all to some extent.1993, W. Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell, Towards a New Socialism, pages 163-164, 168
- Coined by Australian philosopher John Burnheim, a demarchy, or lottocracy, is a form of government in which the state is governed by randomly selected decision makers who have been selected from a pool of eligible citizens. Demarchies have been portrayed extensively in scifi, including Alastair...2014 June 12, George Dvorsky, “12 Futuristic Forms of Government That Could One Day Rule the World”, in Gizmodo
- Synonyms:
- lottocracy
Synonyms of demarchy
Forms of demarchy
| plural | demarchies |
|---|
Origin of demarchy
From demo- + -archy.
Words formed from demarchy
Questions about demarchy
- What does demarchy mean?
- Demarchy means government by decision-makers who have been randomly selected by sortition (lot) from a pool of eligible citizens.
- What part of speech is demarchy?
- Demarchy is a noun.
- What is the plural of demarchy?
- The plural of demarchy is demarchies.
Words near demarchy in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: demarchy (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “demarchy.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/demarchy. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.