It’s no secret that democracy is in trouble. Studies show that a growing number of countries are less free, and polls suggest ordinary citizens are losing faith in their governments. What can be done to fix this? Conventional wisdom often points to piecemeal reforms on campaign finance, for example, or on better educating voters and taking steps to increase turnout on election days.
Hélène Landemore once subscribed to those theories, too, but no longer. The Yale scholar has come to believe that it’s not democracy but electoral politics that is the problem. And the answer isn’t some sort of Band-Aid but to get rid of elections altogether. It’s a radical idea, to be sure, and Landemore accepts as much in her new book, Politics Without Politicians. I invited her on FP Live to interrogate her ideas further. Subscribers can watch the full discussion on the video box atop this page or on the FP Live podcast. What follows here is a lightly edited and condensed transcript.
Ravi Agrawal: You say that electoral politics is beyond repair but that democracy is not. Explain that.
Hélène Landemore: Maybe because I’m a theorist, I have the luxury of taking a step back, philosophically, historically, and looking at the bigger picture. And my sense is that the ideal of democracy, our aspiration to people’s power, is still very much alive and very much in people’s hearts. But the implementation—electoral democracy—is failing us over and over again. And I think, at this point, it’s time to ask the tough questions, like: Do we still need politicians? They may have performed a valuable role in the 18th century, when the conditions and the levels of education were lower, when technologies didn’t connect us so closely. But now they might be causing more problems than they solve.
RA: You’ve been a scholar in this area for so long, and there was a time when you entertained ideas to fix specific elements of electoral democracy, such as campaign finance reform. What’s made you give up on all of those discussions and debates?
HL: Elections are an oligarchic selection mechanism. It means that they will systematically, not accidentally, oversample the wealthy, the connected, the already powerful in society. They will sample from the top of the distribution. So they won’t distribute power equally, which would be a democratic way of selecting representatives, when everybody has an equal chance of accessing the center of power. The only way to get an equal distribution of power is through random selection. One person, one lottery ticket. Any deviation from that basic selection mechanism will generate inequalities.
RA: So let’s move to your alternative to elections. The idea at the heart of your new book and also your previous one, Open Democracy, is citizens’ assemblies. Tell us what they are and how they work.
HL: Citizens’ assemblies are large groups of ordinary citizens, picked at random from the source population and brought together for a sustained period of time—several weekends typically, over many months—to deliberate about issues that are controversial or difficult, like abortion, climate justice, urban planning, what to do with nuclear plants, questions of gender equality, marriage equality, biodiversity, electoral reform, you name it. They’ve been done around the world. We have close to a thousand cases of various sizes, mostly at the local level. But they’re really able to address a number of issues and bring together people from opposite ends of the political spectrum, all ages, all backgrounds, and get them to talk to each other and learn together and eventually agree and make recommendations to the politicians who commission such assemblies.
RA: How does an ordinary citizen who’s taking time out from their regular life get up to speed on a complex issue that they don’t know anything about? Who helps them? And then how do they reach consensus?
HL: There’s a very important role that experts play in these assemblies. The first phase of a citizens’ assembly typically is about learning. But it’s not learning as if they’re students who are going to be taught by experts. They’re going to teach each other and learn on the basis of expert debates, expert presentations. The idea is really as if they’re the ones on top and the experts are on tap, helping them learn, helping them educate themselves and each other about a particular topic. Sometimes they will question expert frameworks. Sometimes they will ask another expert to come in and testify. And they will debate among themselves how convincing the evidence is, how convincing their arguments are, etc. By the end of the process, they themselves become a different kind of expert. For example, at the Citizens’ Convention on Climate, which I observed in France in 2019 and 2020, by the end I was completely lost. The level of the conversation was above me.
RA: Tell us a bit more about that, actually, because that’s one of the most famous examples of a citizens’ assembly. How did it come about?
HL: In 2018, President Emmanuel Macron decided to pass a fuel tax in the name of environmental concerns, maybe to fill a hole in the budget, who knows. But the result was catastrophic. It caused a massive rebellion from the so-called “yellow vests,” people who live in the suburbs, who are lower-middle-class, who need their cars to go to work. Typically, they do not have electric vehicles, do not have access to public transportation, and felt unjustly punished by this fuel tax. So they rebelled. They occupied roundabouts, they demonstrated on highways, and then they went all the way to Paris and demonstrated on the Champs-Élysées and burned things down. It got really ugly, and Macron ran out of options.
So we did what he called a great national debate that lasted two months, during which everybody got a chance to say what they wanted to say, either on an internet platform or in locally organized meetings or also in the context of 18 randomly selected assemblies, organized at the regional level. That latter experiment went so well that Macron said, “I will organize a citizens’ assembly at the national level, with 150 randomly selected French citizens, whom I will bring to the Iéna Palace in Paris for nine months and eight weekends, and you’ll have to come up with a better solution than my fuel tax to the problem of climate change.”
RA: And these people were being paid for it, of course.
HL: These people were being paid around 84 euros per day, I believe, which was around 2,500 euros for the whole thing. So a full month of work for a lot of people. He just told them, “If you think you can beat the politicians, then show me a better answer than a carbon tax,” which is, by the way, the recommendation that all the experts who came to the assembly made, over and over again.
Interestingly, the citizens decided not to follow this recommendation. Among the 149 proposals that came out of the convention after nine months, there was no carbon tax. They said that they understood it was a good idea to have a price signal, but they thought that to do that only at the French level, at the level of the nation, was self-defeating and that it only made sense in the European Union if all the other countries did it too. In the meantime, they didn’t want to punish the working class, basically. They didn’t want to punish the yellow vests, and they thought there were 149 other options. What really struck me is that by the end, the experts themselves were kind of in agreement. Not all of them, to be fair, but many of them were like, “You know what, actually, there are all these other levers we could use before we turn to the carbon tax, and maybe indeed it’s better to do it at the EU level anyway.”
RA: In the book, you also describe a deliberative forum in Quezon City in the Philippines. What happened there?
HL: This is less my area of specialty. Nicole Curato, who’s a colleague in the United Kingdom now, studied assemblies in the Philippines that bring together victims of drug lords and the families of the people who sold the drugs and engaged in violence. You can imagine the intensity of these meetings. There are a lot of deaths that people are mourning. There’s a lot of accusations flying back and forth. And somehow, even in that context, even on something so polarizing and divisive, with so much acrimony and resentment, through deliberation, people came to the conclusion that a lot of what happened is due to structural issues about poverty, about lack of options for young men, about spirals of violence and gangs that don’t really give you a choice. And so they forgave each other. The victims forgave the families of the perpetrators; the families of the perpetrators asked for forgiveness. It was apparently a very moving and intense sort of process.
I’ve seen a version of that, maybe less intense because it’s not about life and death as much, in the context of the French citizens’ assemblies, where the same sort of reconciliation happened between people who disagreed profoundly. For example, the second assembly I observed—and in that case also co-governed—was on end-of-life issues. Whether or not, given the aging population of France, we should consider liberalizing the law and allowing for forms of assisted dying or even euthanasia. This touches on so many issues, including religious issues, issues of conscience and philosophy of life, etc. You had a big division in the group between those who were in favor, those who were against, and it’s not clear that they changed their minds on either side, fundamentally.
But somehow, by the end, the report was voted with over 90 percent support. That was a report that contained a recommendation to liberalize the law and allow some forms of assisted dying, some form of euthanasia. But half of it was about palliative care, recommending that the government invest massively in units where people are taken care of when they’re close to the end because if they feel reassured and their pain is alleviated, they won’t be tempted by the more radical solutions. It was such a successful process that I remember in the last session, one of the representatives of the minority—a woman who’s very Catholic and by principle opposed to liberalizing the law—she said publicly, “I want to thank the 76 percent in favor of liberalizing the law for giving us, the minority, 50 percent of the final report and 50 percent the speaking time.” It means that in this context, the minority was not bulldozed over, was not ignored, was actually listened to very carefully, felt respected, felt that their views were taken into account, that their recommendation about palliative care was really influential. And so they could reconcile themselves with a report that in the end made a recommendation that they still disagree with.
That’s a beautiful version of democracy. In electoral democracy, we have this idea that if this time, this side wins, then next time we will have our revenge or we will have our turn. It’s beautiful because it saves us from violence. But it’s not that beautiful because it’s based on a winner-take-all approach, whereby when you win, you win and you just ignore the losers. In this deliberative context, it’s very different.
RA: When you used the word “reconciliation,” I was reminded of truth and reconciliation and the processes that postwar societies sometimes go through. Is there a world in which we can incorporate some of these ideas and techniques for people to be heard without just getting rid of elections? In other words, why completely transform the system instead of taking the best parts from all of it?
HL: That’s a very deep question. I understand politics without politicians in two ways. One is the radical, more theoretical way, whereby I try to imagine what it would look like to have a completely nonelectoral democracy. It’s really important to have a clear picture of what the pros and cons of such a vision would be. Second, there’s a more modest, reformist, practical vision of politics without politicians, which is simply about carving out spaces in the current system for ordinary citizens. It’s not that we get rid of politicians altogether—it’s that we create a space where they’re not there and it’s just about us ordinary citizens talking to each other, making friends with each other, and coming up with a vision that we then transfer to the politicians, and hopefully that would be influential and shape their own process.
That said, there’s a big question: How do you insert this space, this assembly, this house of the people—working-class people, nurses, gardeners, Uber drivers? This assembly would look very different from elected assemblies, where it’s a lot of lawyers, doctors, and people who’ve made a job of politics after many years. Let’s say we go this reformist route. What’s the relationship between the two logics, the two legitimacies? One is based on the logic and legitimacy that elections convey. Your vote gives you a certain legitimacy. The other type of legitimacy is based on equality. We all got into that assembly because we were randomly selected, and the legitimacy comes from true democratic equality.
The problem is that we don’t have a clear idea of how the relationship would evolve over time. Maybe it would be stable. My colleagues John Gastil and the late Erik Olin Wright proposed a model of a legislature by law that would act as a sort of veto player for elected assemblies, which would prevent the worst decisions—maybe tariffs would have been vetoed or something like that. Or you could imagine reversing the rules, and now the big-picture vision for the country comes no longer from parties but from this central assembly, and at the periphery, you have this second assembly that is in charge of implementing the vision.
I’m not entirely sure how that would work—that’s why it’s much easier to picture the simple model. One trajectory you could imagine is that ultimately, the citizens’ assembly would displace the electoral assembly, simply because it would produce better proposals. It would better track the preferences of the majorities and diagnose the problems. So what would happen to elected assemblies over time would be the sort of displacement that happened to the House of Lords.
RA: But that is the best-case scenario, right? Critics of your idea would ask how ordinary citizens can make painful decisions. For example, you mentioned tariffs earlier, but tariffs, as we know, are a tax on people. It’s hard to imagine that regular people would vote for more taxes on themselves. It’s hard to imagine that regular people would make a decision that is in a hypothetical national interest rather than a local interest—for people who live far away from them or look different than they do, at personal cost. How would a citizens’ assembly grapple with those kinds of issues?
HL: They do already, in a way—not many of them, it’s true, because we tend to take away the painful economic trade-offs. I admit that there’s been a flaw in the implementation so far. But one example is a recommendation that was pushed by the members of the citizens’ assembly on climate, who wanted to implement a program of global housing renovations across France in which everyone would be forced under a penalty of not being able to sell their house or their apartment, or even rent it, until they renovated their lodging to make it energy-efficient because it’s one of the main sources of greenhouse gas emissions in France.
I thought this was a coercive measure with a painful cost and that it would never be supported by the larger public. But it turns out that the assembly recommended it, even though it was a bit punitive for property owners. Many of the people in the assembly owned buildings or houses or apartments and pushed back. But in the end, they seemed convinced, given the arguments from the experts, that they could get along with that solution, even at personal cost to themselves and people like them. Unfortunately, this set of recommendations did not go to a referendum. But we know from polls that 74 percent of the French supported most of the recommendations and that one in particular. That was a big shock for me. They were ready to make that economic sacrifice to a degree.
RA: Let me ask you a more extreme version of the question I just asked. Let’s say a country is at war. Countries that are at war, for national security reasons, suspend elections. Ukraine, for instance. Many countries around the world have seen people power, at its core, as a weakness that needs to be hidden away when a country is truly in crisis—especially of a national security kind or one that deals with another aggressive power that might not be a democracy. How does your model account for those kinds of issues? Aren’t these the very moments when you need politicians the most—someone who is a good speaker and can inspire people who are in need of inspiration, who can lead in a moment of real crisis?
HL: It’s a very good question. In my book, I do not address that question because the model is meant for so-called “normal politics” in times of peace. For moments of crisis, you would probably have to rely on the same emergency measures that you have in the current system. You would have to devolve some decision power, temporarily, to an executive. But I don’t know that the executive in my model would have to be an elected executive; it could be an appointed executive that is chosen by the citizens’ assembly from a list of people who have shown that they’re remarkable statesmen.
I do think there’s still room for statesmen and stateswomen in my model—it’s just that they don’t necessarily get identified through elections. Even inside these citizens’ assemblies, you see certain types of people emerge as natural leaders. They always exist, and they’re respected and socially elevated within these assemblies to the extent that they serve the group. But the minute they start acting like politicians, trying to hog the microphone in plenaries or rush to the journalist at the end of the meeting to speak on behalf of the whole group and trying to get the perks of power, they lose authority and legitimacy in the group.
I’m sure this is not fully answering your question, and there are a lot of holes in my theory because we’re still at the beginning of this attempt to reinvent democracy along more inclusive lines. But I don’t think that this would necessarily be a slam-dunk argument against it. Again, look back at ancient Athens. They did have people leading them into battle, like Pericles, who actually was elected in that case. But he was elected as a military strategist, not a decision-maker about the common good. When it came to deciding whether to go to war, it was not Pericles who decided. He could talk in the assembly, certainly, and perhaps he had a very large influence. But he was not the one making that call in the end because who was going to die in those wars? Regular Athenians—the peasants, farmers, and blacksmiths. So they were asked, do you want to go to Sicily or not? Do you want to risk your life and risk not coming back? So they were the ones making those decisions.
RA: Can you make a distinction between the collaborative process you’re describing and a referendum? You said earlier that informed decisions need to be made. My mind immediately goes to the Brexit referendum, which the people voted for. But by all accounts, the evidence now shows this was not good for the U.K. economy. Can’t ordinary citizens often make incredibly bad decisions as well?
HL: Absolutely, and so did the Greeks. They put Socrates to death; they’ll carry that stain forever. This is always a counterargument, an objection to direct democracy and mass referenda. But you have to look at it in a systemic way, and the evidence from studies of referenda in the United States (especially at the state level), in Switzerland, and other places where they are routinely run is pretty good, actually. It gets people what they want. It’s not markedly more anti-minority than nondirect ways of making decisions.
If democracy is anything, it’s moments of mass decision-making. I focus a lot on citizens’ assemblies because I’m concerned about a more democratic form of representation. But I cannot imagine getting rid entirely of moments of mass voting. Even a citizens’ assembly could get things wrong. So, if they’re not sure, they could put their decision or their bundle of decisions to a referendum. In terms of the Brexit example, I’m not sure this was the wrong decision. I’m 55 percent sure it was the wrong decision, but in the grand scheme of things, it was an expression of popular sovereignty. It was a sobering moment for elites. It was the reclaiming of something against, in part, the European Union, which had grown too unwieldy, bureaucratic, and neoliberal for its own sake. So maybe it did at least some good to have that moment of, well, actually, it’s not working. We’re out. I understand it’s bad for the U.K. economy, but is it bad for democracy? These terms are not interchangeable.
RA: The spirit of this whole discussion so far has been one of experimentation. You openly admit the ideas you’re presenting are radical, yet they are being experimented on around the world. Despite the radicalness of these suggestions, I think you are, deep down, also pragmatic about what could work and what would be taken on board by politicians. How feasible do you think it is that countries would adopt more of your recommendations? It’s very hard for me to imagine that politicians will ever give up power and get rid of themselves.
HL: First, I have to say that it’s not just my proposal. I’m not alone; I’m surrounded by an army of people at this point. They call themselves Kleroterion, Sortitionist, advocates for a lot-based democracy—there are different names. My colleagues, Alex Guerrero; Gastil and Wright, whom I mentioned; Brett Hennig—there are many people out there who are pushing these ideas in various formats with different visions, and I think it’s making a difference.
As we speak, I’m planning a citizens’ assembly in Connecticut for the summer. We’ve raised enough money, and we’ve got the support of politicians, believe it or not—the comptroller of the state of Connecticut. So it’s actually not true that politicians will never give up power. As a class, it might be very hard, but you can find individuals who are visionaries and understand that it’s potentially, at least in the short term, to their benefit to exchange a little bit of power for greater legitimacy. They can outsource some of their decisions to a group of randomly selected citizens, and in exchange, they gain credibility and legitimacy in the eyes of their own constituents, which stabilizes their power. It soothes the anger that many people feel, makes them feel heard; it’s a solution to populism, in a way.
Of course, the danger is that it can be instrumentalized by politicians. This can easily turn into what people call “participation-washing.” But it can also unsettle the status quo. It can open the Overton window. Historically, it’s very unpredictable what will happen, but there are changes that can happen overnight, almost, if the conditions are ripe. So I just want to give people the tools to understand what’s possible.
You’re right: Nothing changes until politicians feel as if they’re stuck. That was true in Ireland—they didn’t know how to address the question of marriage equality, so they gave the hot potato to a citizens’ assembly. That was true in France—without the yellow vests protests, you do not have the first citizens’ assembly at the national level in France. That was true in Iceland, which had to collapse financially in 2008 for the very innovative process of crowdsourcing the constitution to happen. It’s true pretty much anywhere.
But politicians are smart. They observe what’s happening, and they may say, maybe we don’t have to wait for an enormous crisis to hit to anticipate and build the dams that Machiavelli said you should build to be safe from black swans. So I’m hoping this is what’s going to happen, that we’re going to run the assembly and help solve a crisis in Connecticut, which is that there’s not enough money to fund local public services—towns are very unequal in their ability to provide those services to their people, and elected politicians cannot solve this problem because no one wins an election by promising more taxes. This is something that the citizens will have to debate among themselves. How many sacrifices are we ready to make? Can we share tax revenue across town lines? Do we want to invent new sources of revenues and property taxes, which is the only source of revenue at the local level in Connecticut?
You asked me if citizens can accept economic costs. I think they can, but you need to give them an opportunity to think, to weigh the pros and cons themselves, and to develop enough of a bond with others that they can feel solidarity. Because as long as there are others you can demonize and assume to be lazy or unworthy, it’s very easy to remain selfish. But if you meet them and you realize they’re just like you and they have issues and didn’t do anything to deserve the situation they’re in, it very much changes your empathy level and your capacity to want to do something for the common good.
RA: In the book, you cite a William Buckley line where he says he would sooner be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 members of the faculty of Harvard University. It strikes me that that kind of thinking is what we would hear from populists on the far right or the far left. Donald Trump would call it “drain the swamp.” How is any of that different from what you’re saying?
HL: That’s a very good question. The diagnostic is not that different. I’ll be transparent about that. I do think that there’s a questioning of the influence of elites in the system that I share with the populists, you might say. But the answer is quite radically different because the populists typically say, “I’m the answer. I alone can save you. I alone can represent the people. I alone can drain the swamp. Vote for me.” That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying the solution is all of us together, and if we can’t do it all at once, then a subset of us that will be randomly selected and frequently rotated so that unlike what happens with the populist solution, there’s no risk of a concentration of power into the hands of one dangerous lunatic, which is always a danger with populist solutions.
I think populists are popular because they diagnose the problem more or less accurately. The system is too elitist. It’s too responsive to the preferences of the affluent and not enough to the preferences of the working class and the people I call “the shy” in the book. But that doesn’t mean their solutions are good. They will make the problems worse, and they will potentially make us veer from very imperfect oligarchy to fascism or authoritarianism. So my solution is actually not populist. It’s democratic in the radical sense, a return to people’s power.
RA: I have to address one irony that almost everyone who’s watching or listening is going to point out: You are a professor at Yale, and therefore, it’s very easy to call you the elite. Let me say the same about myself: I’ve rapidly, despite my best attempts, become a card-carrying member of the foreign-policy establishment. So there’s a certain irony in the two of us having this discussion about how democracy has become too centered on the elites rather than the people, as it were.
HL: Absolutely. That’s why in the book I have a few pages devoted to my biography, my own personal trajectory from a child of a middle-class family in Normandy to being a professor at an Ivy League. I think I’m an elite, absolutely. I have elite tastes. I have elite acquaintances. I was just in Davos [for the World Economic Forum]. This is as elite as it gets at this point.
RA: Me too. That’s where we last met.
HL: But I would say that because of my particular trajectory and a history of failure and a story of not quite measuring up to the expectations of the elite system I was supposed to be shaped by, I’ve come to question a lot of assumptions about who should govern. I’ve come to question a lot of the teaching and education I’ve received. I’ve come to question the authorities that I was brought up to revere and be differential toward.
And I have to say, the more I climb in the system—including when I reach places like Davos—the less impressed I am and the more convinced I become that there’s no reason to defer, no reason to think people at the top know that much better than ordinary citizens, if the latter were given the time and opportunity to consider the questions and policy issues that are currently decided on their behalf by these elites. I think they would have common sense. They would have the capacity to see through the trade-offs and the difficulties and to make enlightened judgments.
RA: I have no doubt that ordinary citizens are wise beyond our imagination, or beyond conventional wisdom, and we should trust them. But I have one small quibble: Not all politicians are bad. Many of them go into their line of work trying to do good, thinking about problems in the right ways. Many of them work very hard. Similarly at Davos—a place often seen as an elite cabal, which it is—one often runs into do-gooders and people who are genuinely trying to move the needle in a way that they define as better for humanity. So it’s a little bit more nuanced than good or bad when it comes to politicians, or even elite cabals, such as the universities that we’ve both been to.
HL: Absolutely. In the book, I try not to go the conspiratorial route of saying, “They’re all evil. They’re all ill-intentioned. And it’s all the corruption from top to bottom.” Absolutely not, and I don’t pursue ad hominem attacks toward anyone. It’s really a problem about the selection process and the resulting group of professional politicians as a whole, not any individuals in particular.
I believe that even if politicians were as well-intentioned as we could imagine, even if there were no corruption whatsoever, even if you imagined the ideal version of electoral democracy, you would still run into the problems I diagnosed, which is an over-representation of a certain type of people that you can define through socioeconomic characteristics but also age. They’re overwhelmingly older than the people they represent. They are type A. They are bold. They are not shy. They’re not wallflowers. I think it’s a problem. It’s a problem for the way they perceive the world.
