If there is a right to democracy, what is it a right to?

Some political philosophers (for example Joshua Cohen) have argued that there is no right to democracy. To posit such a right would on their view be to make certain democratic technologies, most notably multi-party elections, criterial for decent, legitimate governance. This would evince objectionable ethnocentrism. The assumption underlying this claim is, of course, democracy requires elections. The emergence of the "lottocratic alternative" allows us to question this assumption. According to a number of contemporary philosophers (Guerrero, Lopez-Guerra, Abizadeh), democracy is compatible, and indeed under some sets of conditions is even better realized, through sortition. If this is the case, then a right to democracy would not have to be tied to elections. It would involve, rather, the institutions that embody a value or a set of values that are multiply realizable through a set of distinct institutional mechanisms. But what are these values? The challenge is to identify normative considerations that are sufficiently capacious to encompass both electoral democracy and sortition but not so broad as to underlie any form of decent governance. The risk is of course to end up making the concept of "democracy" vacuous. This paper will assess a number of ways in which to identify the relevant normative considerations. It will focus in particular on a number of distinct construals of the concept of democratic equality. I will argue that there is no single conception of democratic equality that accounts both for electoral democracy and for sortition, and thus, that the difference between electoral democracy and lottocracy is not just a question of morally indistinguishable "technology". Rather, it is normatively significant. Following such authors as Tuck and Waldron, I argue that elections allow for a form of equality of political agency that is absent from the aforementioned alternatives. I will moreover suggest that this conception of democratic equality is morally superior. The conclusions of the paper will be that, at the very least, we are better off, using different concepts to denote these normatively different technologies, in order to make the choices we face more perspicuous. While sortition may do better with respect to certain relevant values (most notably epistemic considerations), it is important to conceptualize different forms of political systems in ways that do not hide from view the moral distinctiveness of multi-party electoral systems. But I will also develop arguments to the effect that they are not just different. Rather, electoral democracy does better at realizing a conception of democratic equality that we have reason to see as bearing moral priority. I will end with a section that questions whether all electoral systems fare as well with respect to this value. I will hold that though there are reasons to prefer some electoral. systems over others, the norm of equality of political agency does not provide us with reasons to prefer one such system over another (provided of course that they all meet conditions of procedural fairness).