Demarchy is a term coined by Australian philosopher John Burnheim to describe a political system without the state or bureaucracies, and based instead on randomly selected groups of decision makers. These groups, sometimes termed "policy juries," "citizens' juries," or "consensus conferences," would deliberate and make decisions about public policies in much the same way that juries reach verdicts on criminal cases.

Demarchy attempts to overcome some of the functional problems with conventional representative democracies, which in practice have often been subject to manipulation by special interests and a divide between professional policymakers (politicians and lobbyists) vs. a largely passive, uninvolved and often uninformed electorate. According to Burnheim, random selection of policymakers would make it easier for everyday citizens to meaningfully participate, and harder for special interests to corrupt the process.

More generally, random selection of decision makers is known as sortition. The Athenian democracy made much use of sortition, with nearly all government offices filled by lottery rather than by election.

Recently, the Canadian province of British Columbia has made use of Demarchy in the formation of the Citizen's Assembly; a group of citizens randomly selected to propose a new electoral process to be ratified by the general population by referendum.

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