After November’s election , after the seemingly endless campaign and billions of dollars in advertisements, Americans are now sending to Washington a new Congress that looks very much like the previous Congress, despite the fact that years of gridlock have earned the chamber some of the lowest approval ratings in American politics.

The performance of our elected officials has led many people to wonder whether we might as well just pluck people at random and send them to Washington. For a small but fervent group of political philosophers, that’s not a joke—it’s a serious idea. They argue we’d be better off if we scrapped congressional elections altogether and instead filled the House of Representatives with 435 Americans selected lottery-style from the population.