What would keep people in line is that this would be illegal. A lottery-based system is also problematic for lobbyists because they have to bribe many more people and they can't help elect the people they have already bribed. If they try to bribe the wrong person, they are in big trouble, because they will get investigated, and even if they succeed, they will have to do it all over again the next year (assuming yearly terms). It's also worth pointing out that a lot of what we call "corruption" is the result of politicians, CEOs and lobbyists going to the same schools, working in the same offices, and just generally being friends. They don't even need to bribe each other. They like each other. Lottery eliminates this aspect almost entirely.
I would say the biggest vulnerability of lottery, with respect to bribery, is debt: if a representative owes a lot of money, they are particularly at risk. Which is why I think the state should pay off all debts owed by all representatives (conditional to not peddling their influence, of course). We can disqualify people who owe excessive amounts so that this doesn't cost too much.
We have similar for jury pool service (I have one in my mail pile for about 10 weeks of notice), but is your case assigned and known to you and the parties to the case? I only know the date and court (we also call the evening before to see if we even need to show up and even if we do have to show up, there's no guarantee that you'll get a case as they have to have a slight surplus rather than slight deficit of potential jurors). I doubt any of the parties know my name before the jury is invited to the challenge phase.
Said differently, if I was a defendant, could I find out the exact jurors 2-4 months ahead of time so that I could arrange to bribe them?
Ah, that's true. The selection of jurors for a particular trial was only on the day itself. The process sounds similar. We had to turn up at court for two weeks, and would get assigned a trial whenever you were free from the previous one, if it was a short one. The unlucky few who land a major trial have to sit it out to the end of course.
Maybe the sanctions that successfully keep jurors from telling the press about trials 99% of the time could work for this too. Maybe it would have to be cleverer somehow.
Bribery is even more rampant now with career aspirations since reelection is costly. The job of politicians is to get reelected and they do it by being available to donors.
If we are able to reduce the question of no reelections to the question of whether we should have term limits, I believe we will find that no reelections will have the same drawbacks as term limits[0].
Lawmaking is a profession, and needs to be done by professionals. If it is not, studies show that power shifts towards other existing power structures, such as the head of state and to lobbyists[1], which would make a lottery based appointments counterproductive on the issue of corruption.
You are absolutely right about lawmaking being a profession, but in a lottery system, I reckon these professional lawmakers would simply be hired by the representatives, and they could stay on for as long as they are deemed useful. The representatives would act more like full-time overseers on the executive and legislative branches, if that makes sense.
Junior lawmakers are also perfectly capable of hiring senior lawmakers yet the balance of power still shifts towards lobbyists, so I would assume that the same issue would exist for lottery-drawn representatives.
Perhaps. I think there are generally three ways lobbyists can exert influence:
1. By nurturing personal relationships with politicians. I may be mistaken, but I feel like this is probably the most effective method. You want to exploit the natural tendency people have to want to help their friends, even decent people.
2. By helping politicians get what they want (e.g. reelection, but also first election, or election to a new position).
3. By providing compelling arguments and objections to various policies, grounded in special knowledge about their industry. These compelling arguments may be good (in which case the lobbyist's influence is actually a good thing), but they may also be bad (misdirection or lies).
I think lottery is less vulnerable to 1 and 2 (but not immune). It doesn't help against 3, although having seasoned lawmakers does, since they can see through the bullshit.
Either way, it's speculative, and it would need to be properly evaluated somehow.
As I said elsewhere, I'm leaning towards being required to register for the lottery exactly once every ten years or so. I think that'd be a reasonable compromise to ensure a representative sample of the population without inconveniencing people excessively.
