Demarchy

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    Government by decision-makers who have been randomly selected by sortition (lot) from a pool of eligible citizens. countable, uncountable

    "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."

Synonyms

All synonyms
lottocracylottocracy

Example

More examples

"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."

Etymology

From demo- + -archy.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.