Abstract:

In recent years, there have been various criticisms in the literature that today's representative democracy practices cannot meet the needs of the modern age and are in a crisis of legitimacy. It is stated that the elections and the elected representatives cannot adequately fulfill their roles in ensuring the active participation they undertake, and researches are being conducted on what alternative participation mechanisms to the management might be other than voting. Along with the ongoing search for solutions, different participatory democracy practices have been implemented in various parts of the world, with successful results at different levels. In Reybrouck's book The Crisis of Democracy, we see the widespread democratic concern in the literature that representative democracy limits citizen participation. As the main argument, the author claims that democracy is destroyed by being limited to elections, supporting his argument with historical country cases. As a solution, he proposes to restart the Ancient Greek practice of electing a parliament by lot, which he defines as a more democratic tool rather than elections. The work is important in terms of being informative and encouraging about participatory democracy practices and deliberative democracy practices based on lots.