Hélène Landemore, a political theorist who writes frequently on democracy, has a new book titled Politics Without Politicians. It is in many ways the culmination and popularization of her previous work on democratic theory and practice, all of which argues in favor of the wisdom and capability of ordinary citizens. In this new book she forcefully makes the case that the problems facing many representative democracies of the world would best be addressed through giving power to randomly selected groups of citizens. That is the main thesis of the book, which I will expand on below.
But first, why does she think this? Right away, Landemore says that, after thinking about democracy and resisting this conclusion for a decade, she has finally admitted “electoral politics is beyond repair. But democracy isn’t.” (1). Her book thus begins by listing common problems facing government in America and other wealthy democracies—most specifically, the continued dominance by discredited elites and the persistent unpopularity of our elected leaders.
Some commentators claim that the people are the source of these current problems and that the solution is less democracy. On this score, she mentions Jason Brennan’s Against Democracy and Garett Jones’ 10% Less Democracy. (Other books advocating this perspective include Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter and, less radically, Democracy for Realists by Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, I would add).
Landemore, correctly, goes in the other direction. If the problem is economic and political elites, the solution is more democracy, not less. So what would it mean to have politics without politicians? Won’t anyone who gets involved in a leadership or decision-making role become a politician (with all the negative connotations this entails—out of touch, elitist, corrupt) over time?
To answer this question, how should we define these two categories? For Landemore, “ordinary citizens are those who are not professionally involved in politics.” On the other hand,“politicians, by definition, hold professional political responsibilities that set them apart from the rest of us.” (33).
How can we get ordinary citizens involved in politics without turning them into politicians? Again, as will be detailed below, the answer for Landemore is bringing citizens into political decision-making through temporary bodies of randomly selected citizens. But first let’s step back and ask again why we might want this.
William F. Buckley Jr. famously said “I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the telephone directory than by the Harvard University faculty.” While Buckley was a conservative, there is nothing inherently conservative or liberal, right or left, in this particular quote. What it embodies, rather, is a democratic attitude and this is why Landemore mentions it. As she says, “a large, random sample of the population might not be such a bad mix of people. In fact, it could be both more democratic and more effective to be governed by them than by a group of Harvard academics.” (5).
(It is also a litmus test for your political gut. Do you instinctively agree with the Buckley quote, as Landemore and I both do? Or do you recoil and feel the opposite way? Answers to this question also cut across conventional political cleavages.)
A random selection of citizens would be more democratic, sure. But why might it be more effective? First, Landemore points to the “problems with existing representative systems. Ordinary citizens are peripheral to them, convened now and again for the purpose of selecting representatives but kept at bay most of the time.” (8). Landemore’s alternative, citizen-led approach, “consists…of a vision of politics centering deliberative processes—ordinary people talking to one another with the goal of coming to a joint decision that works for most.” (9).
She thus envisions a form of democracy where “politics is neither a job nor a chore. It is instead a civic duty…” (11). Her vision also “centers on deliberative assemblies of citizens appointed through civic lotteries.” (11). Below I will consider some of the strengths and weaknesses of lottery versus a self-selection approach to participatory politics. For now note that her approach avoids the creation of a new political class because people will be randomly selected to deliberate and decide on certain issues before returning to their day-to-day lives. In the world of citizen lotteries there would be no professional class of politicians just as there is no professional class of jurors in the United States.
Another piece of evidence for widespread democratic discontent lies in the many protests in democratic countries around the world in the past decade-plus, especially in the oldest representative democracies. “The common thread seemed to be widespread discontent with a political system seen as detached, incompetent, corrupt, and fundamentally unjust.” (29). Again, the defining feature in many of the longstanding representative democracies of the world is “profound dissatisfaction with the economic and political system, and distrust of ruling elites.” (30). This connects with my claim, in Does Democracy Have a Future?, that the 21st century will be defined not by emerging democracies and how they consolidate, but by systemic problems facing the longstanding, consolidated democracies of the world.
Landmore argues that our biggest problem is “how we select our ruling class. The issue isn’t just governance—it’s electoral representation and the professional class of politicians it perpetuates.” (30). The problem with politicians lies not with who they are as individuals but instead with their existence as a group that, by running for elections, fundraising, and holding office for a long time, “stay in power so long that they become a class of their own.” (23).
Drawing on Bernard Manin, Landemore argues that elections are oligarchic, not fundamentally democratic. They lead to the selection of a distinct class of people, politicians, who have political power and get to make the laws that bind us all. The truly democratic mechanism, going back to Ancient Athens, is to either have everyone directly vote on the laws (what we now call direct democracy) or to randomly select a subset of citizens (often called sortition or lot), as we do for jury duty.
This would be the most effective way to reverse the depressing currently reality documented by scholars like Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, whose “empirical studies suggest that true power lies with the smaller, wealthier part of the population, and that electoral democracies are, indeed, plutocracies.” (57).
The Virtues of Lottery
Landemore runs through various reasons why electoral politics haven’t been working very well. Ultimately, she argues, it is due to how we select our leaders. Her basic suggestion seems to be that we can revitalize democracy through a combination of direct referenda votes on some issues and jury-style randomly selected mini-publics to decide others.
“…what we can learn, or relearn, from the Greeks is that political expertise is also acquired on the job. The less we give people an opportunity to participate the less capable they are. The more we ask of them, the more they learn.” (86). Landemore is here articulating one of the basic principles of participatory democracy. I couldn’t agree more.
What happened to selecting citizens by lottery? In Ancient Athens, while key policies were decided in an open vote among all citizens, key offices were filled via random selection, aka lottery. They also filled their large juries with a lottery of random citizens, as we still do today. However, using lot outside of jury duty disappeared “sometime between the middle of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century” (89). This is deeply disappointing, because lot is the best embodiment of political equality: “random selection has the merit of giving everyone the exact same mathematical chance of occupying a position of power.” (104).
Landmore also cites the diversity trumps ability theorem. This is the idea that, at least where there are correct answers, a diverse group of people will perform better than a homogenous group of highly capable people. Why? Because, with greater diversity, “everyone contributes a different perspective, piece of information, or argument to the political question of the common good, whereas even the smartest few are likely to miss elements of the big picture.” (112).
In other words, groups of highly trained elites tend to be similar—they have the same prejudices, the same experiences, and the same blindspots. For a real world example think of the brilliant yet clueless people in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who dragged us into the Vietnam War. Whereas lot, by using random selection, best embodies the promise of diversity. “Lot’s instrumental value for collective intelligence comes from its ability to reproduce at small scale the cognitive diversity present in the larger group.” (113). A lot, in other words, produces a microcosm of the wisdom embodied in the millions of ordinary citizens that populate a democracy.
A key part of Landemore’s argument for the power of random citizens lies in the evidence she marshals concerning the positive impact of deliberative polls and other mini-publics. There are multiple examples to draw from, including the Irish citizens council on abortion as well as a French council on climate change.
Consider the French Citizen’s Convention for Climate, which ran from 2019 to 2020. President Macron’s proposed fuel tax (to address climate change) spurred the Yellow Vest movement, a widespread set of protests that crossed conventional political lines. In turn, the government set up this convention on climate, composed of 150 randomly selected citizens, with the goal of producing a better policy to address climate change. It was a 9 month process over seven weekends with a $6 million budget. Over the course of this time the citizens produced more than 100 proposals for addressing climate change, none of which involved a fuel tax. This convention revealed that ordinary citizens could come up with a range of proposals for addressing climate change that were far more popular (and innovative) than what conventional politicians could think of.
Landemore says that when given the power to initiate and formulate laws (or sufficiently law-like proposals) these random citizen participants are “citizen legislators.” They aren’t just offering recommendations like an advisory committee. Rather, citizen legislators are a “specific subset of citizen representatives: their function is to formulate legislative proposals and to draft laws. The term “citizen” signals that these actors are laypeople—not professional politicians or members of a demographically distinct elite.” (133).
Furthermore, Landemore reports on the openness, new connections, and even “civic love” that were forged during these extended sessions of citizen participation. As she says, “somewhere between the first and third sessions, the participants had clearly bonded, forming a genuine connection.” (156). Something similar can happen among jurors if they find themselves with the civic privilege and responsibility of serving on a multi-day trial.
Such citizen assemblies demonstrate that citizens can be effective deliberators and decision-makers. “And one of the reasons why they succeed in solving problems, often precisely where politicians fail, is because they bond and learn to care for one another, and even to love one another.” (171). Her account offers considerable detail on what worked and didn’t work in the assemblies where she was involved as an observer but I won’t cover more of that here.
What are some concerns with Landemore’s account?
Will participation in these citizen assemblies be a waste of time? As Landemore rightly notes, “there is no point in convening a citizens’ assembly if its recommendations will only be ignored.” Agreed. She goes on to say “at the very least, there should be a credible commitment up front to seriously consider the conclusions of the citizens’ assembly—and, ideally, a clear and convincing explanation afterward of how the commissioning body plans to respond to them.” (198).
To be blunt, this simply isn’t good enough. This is where we need a dose of participatory democracy as defined by Carole Pateman, where people have the right to make binding decisions in government.
However, at later points in the book, Landemore strikes a more radical tone, suggesting that legally empowered random assemblies should be combined with legal referenda to create a politics without politicians. Doing so would, if institutionalized, move far beyond the sort of citizens’ advisory boards that she gestured at in the previous quote. To be meaningfully democratic, face-to-face groups of citizens, whether self-selected as in participatory budgeting or randomly selected by lot as in Landemore’s examples, must be empowered to make binding decisions. Take again the example of a jury—the jury listens, then deliberates, then makes a binding decision on the defendant’s guilt. To do less would be undemocratic and a waste of time.
As Landemore rightly asks, “what should legitimacy—and specifically democratic legitimacy—mean and require in the twenty-first century?” (250). Would randomly selected assemblies, and their resulting decisions, have legitimacy? Unlike direct and participatory democracy, where every citizen can, if they wish, vote on a policy, or representative democracy, where every citizen can vote on who to represent them, assemblies selected by lot would not involve everyone. Every citizen would be eligible, as with jury duty. And, as with jury duty, only a small subset would actually be randomly selected to serve on any given issue. First, this entails a predictive question: would people see these bodies as legitimate? If not, why not? Second, a normative question: should we consider them so?
The virtues of randomly selected bodies of citizens are that, like juries, they are made up of a representative sample of ordinary people, not elites. They embody, as Landemore points out, political equality in a manner that elections do not. Is this enough to overcome the concern that not everyone gets to participate? Maybe. Perhaps their legitimacy rests firmly enough on the fact that all are eligible to participate, i.e. we are all in the random lottery selection.
There are tough trade offs here. The kind of face-to-face, participatory democracy envisioned by Pateman is open to all but faces self-selection issues: will the people who show up be similar to, or care about, the issues that a majority does? When participatory budgeting works well the answer has been “yes.” But there are plenty of examples of local government, especially concerning housing, where a small coterie of wealthy activists dominate the proceedings. I personally feel the pull of both types of face-to-face democracy.
The fact that selecting assemblies by lot (whatever their specific power) makes them a true cross-section of citizens is a strong argument in their favor. I’ll leave Landemore with the last words: “Randomly selected citizens’ assemblies produce ideas and proposals that are more aligned with the preferences of the larger population and draw on a more diverse pool of views and information than those of elected assemblies. As a result, their proposals are likely to be better and more likely to be accepted by the public than those of elected assemblies.” (255).
For further reading I can heartily recommend Landemore’s Open Democracy, a more academic but still accessible presentation of these issues as well as her co-authored book Debating Democracy, in which she debates libertarian philosopher Jason Brennan on the strengths and weaknesses of democracy.