What if our democracy didn't revolve around elections and campaigns or around specific politicians? What if we could rule ourselves differently, in more participatory, more rational, and more effective ways? This episode explores these questions through a conversation with Hélène Landemore, author of Politics Without Politicians: The Case for Citizen Rule and Open Democracy.
Show Notes
About our guest
Hélène Landemore is the author of Politics Without Politicians: The Case for Citizen Rule and Open Democracy. She is currently a Full Professor in the Political Science department at Yale University and a Faculty Fellow with Yale’s Institute for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS), where she founded a research program on Citizens' Assemblies and the “Governing x” conference series. She is also a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford, England. In 2023, she served as an advisor to the Democratic Inputs to AI program at OpenAI. She is currently undertaking work supported by Schmidt Futures through the AI2050 program. Her research and teaching interests include democratic theory, constitutional theory, political epistemology, and the ethics and politics of AI.
Further detours
Jake Thomas explored democratic reform efforts in Oregon, including citizen assemblies, in "Democracy by Lot" in the Summer 2027 issue of Oregon Humanities magazine.
Several elected officials have written about public service for the magazine.
- Eddie Melendrez, a city councilor in Ontario
- Chelsea King, a school board member in Wilsonville
- David Bragdon, president of Metro
For more episodes on democracy and politics, check out:
- Reinventing American Democracy with Danielle Allen
- Manu Meel Is Betting on Bridging
- Dahlia Lithwick on Power, Trust, and the Supreme Court
- Talking across Differences with Mónica Guzmán and Ryan Nakade
Transcript
Adam Davis: Hello, and welcome to The Detour from Oregon Humanities. I'm Adam Davis. It's November 2026, which means it's the midterms, which means that, as usual, all the political conversations around us focus on elections, campaigns, and specific individuals running for specific political offices. But what if our democracy didn't revolve around elections and campaigns or around specific politicians?
What if we could rule ourselves differently in more participatory, more rational, and more effective ways? This episode of The Detour explores these questions through a conversation with Hélène Landemore, author of Politics Without Politicians: The Case for Citizen Rule and Open Democracy. Hélène joined Oregon Humanities in Portland for a ‘Consider This’ conversation in April of this year, and her arguments and questions about other ways to govern ourselves, about civic assemblies and collective intelligence, and surprisingly, about love, feel even more on point today.
Here's Hélène talking about why she says rule rather than governance.
Hélène Landemore: I think I like ‘rulHélènee' because it's more perhaps radical than government even, and less... It should be less foreign. It should be less something that's done by others and more something that we do ourselves. So it's a little bit more something ordinary people can do, as opposed to something, you know, distant politicians, bureaucrats do for us.
Adam Davis: When did you start noticing and caring about forms of rule?
Hélène Landemore: Late. I was very apolitical for a long time, the longest time. I started you know, as a student of philosophy, so I was more interested in reading old books and focusing on moral philosophy questions like, "Why should I be a good person?" That was a big one.
How do you make the right choice? Why do you not steal if you cannot be caught? I mean, I had this Nietzschean phase when I was 17, I guess. And then I guess I figured out the answer, and I moved on to collective questions like how do we make the right collective choices? And then I was reading social sciences, political science, and all kinds of explanations about the virtues of large numbers, the Condorcet jury theorem, the merits of deliberation among many diverse minds.
And I started thinking, "Well, that might be why we should prefer rule by the many over rule by the few." There are just more minds, therefore more diversity of thinking, therefore maybe a better approach to collective problems. Whereas when we restrict the pool of decision-makers, we're creating the potential for enormous blind spots.
So that's when I started thinking, "Oh, okay, rule of one, rule of the few, rule of the many. Which one is best along that one dimension of producing better solutions?"
Adam Davis: Because those are our options: rule of one, rule of the few, rule of the many.
Hélène Landemore: Well, if you follow the typology of Aristotle, yes, that's a sort of, like, framework.
I think that now , with the advent of AI, I think we might have new options. Rule by algorithm looks like it's gonna be one. That worries me a lot.
Adam Davis: Yes.
Hélène Landemore: Yeah.
Adam Davis: Okay. So then the better options still seem to be these, the three options that you kinda laid out.
Hélène Landemore: Well, it depends... Again, it depends actually. Uh, a rule of one, if it's Khamenei in Iran, it's pretty bad.
Maybe, maybe I'd take a few AI delegates over that, you know? Okay. Depends on how they're programmed.
Adam Davis: Okay. So, then it's interesting to think–in a way this was why I was asking about rule. Even in what you just said, rule usually includes or often includes, at the very least, challenges, and sometimes things that are worse than challenges.
And yet, I mean, I guess you could ask the question, why think about rule at all? Why not get away from the idea of rule? That's maybe a question you have to start.
Hélène Landemore: Yes, so it's interesting. I get this question a lot from libertarians. So maybe that's where it's coming from.
Adam Davis: That's a good response.
Hélène Landemore: Well, it's a good question. Why not no rule? Why not anarchy? Well, because I just don't believe that there's a sort of a natural self-organization among humans that will systematically lead to good outcomes. I think it's much more likely to degenerate into the rule of the stronger. I do think we need some form of collective decision-making that is, you know, combined with rule of law in the sense of, okay, it's predictable, it's not, uh, arbitrary, it's constrained.
But at the end of the day, some of us,or all of us, or one of us has to make the decisions, to help us live in peace, to help us divide the labor of making the laws, executing them, assessing their constitutionality, or all of these things. So I think inevitably at some point in the development of humanity, these questions present themselves.
I don't think absence of rule is really an option.
Adam Davis: I was asking the question about rule in part because it feels like where we start is how we are going to rule ourselves, especially as a collective. That there's something about us living in groups where we gotta figure it out. When I asked the question to you about elections, it was a very enthusiastic response, and I wondered how that sounded to you.
Hélène Landemore: Well, you didn't ask about elections, you asked about voting.
Adam Davis: I asked about voting.
Hélène Landemore: See, you tried to trick me. It's not the same at all.
Adam Davis: So what's the difference?
Hélène Landemore: Elections are a selection mechanism to identify who's gonna rule, okay? And we use voting as the way through which we make that selection.
Adam Davis: Okay.
Hélène Landemore: But it's using voting for a specific purpose, which is the choice of persons who are gonna rule on our behalf. Voting can also be used to vote directly on outcomes or on, you know-
Adam Davis: Issues ...
Hélène Landemore: agendas or issues or... So I think we cannot just use voting as a shorthand for elections, right? It was in the- So I'm all in favor of voting.
I think it's very, very important when it's applied to questions, to agendas, programs. When it's used to select people who are gonna take the job of deciding from us, I'm a little bit more skeptical.
Adam Davis: So why are you more skeptical about the kinds of elections that seem to get the most attention, that is, elections of people?
Hélène Landemore: So again, maybe I'm being a stickler about terms, but, I wouldn't use the term elections for referenda. So your question, I think, is, why do I trust the judgment of people when it comes to outcomes and not when it comes to people.
Adam Davis: That's a much better way to ask the question, right?
Hélène Landemore: Well, I mean, there are reasons to be skeptical of human choice in general. That's true. But I think that there are a lot of biases when it comes to choosing people, perhaps more so... And it's a more, much more mediated way to get to an outcome: to choose someone to promise and deliver it for you than to choose it directly.
So I think this is an extra step that I'm a little bit skeptical about. And I think that when we try to select for people, the question is, how are we gonna distribute power amongst ourselves? We could flip a coin. We could, you know, do a lottery. We could go by age. We could make people take a test. We could elect them. And I think surely there are merits to maybe all of these methods, and we've tested several over centuries, and, and I think now we've had about two hundred plus years of experimenting with elections, and my sense is that it's not going so well.
So at some point you have to look at the evidence and ask, "Eh, should we try something else?" And I don't wanna sound too much like a populist, but I do think that even in this country, even in Europe where we have... We're still holding the fort and it's... There's not that much corruption after all, it's just selecting overwhelmingly for certain types of human beings that I'm not sure are that good at governing.
You know? In an election there are two filters. There's a human choice at the end of the process, but upstream of that you have self-selection, the people who run as candidates. We're not choosing them. Some party officials are choosing them. Some people in smoke-filled back rooms are making those decisions at some point.
So we have some responsibility in the final choice, but the reality is that the filter has been applied upstream of even our choice. We don't get that many choices. That's a reality. So I think that elections, as the Greeks knew, as they told us, but we refuse to hear it somehow, are a selection mechanism that tend to produce oligarchies, and not by... Not so much contingently, right? Or if we could just educate more people and get more women to run and get more minorities to run and get more poor people to run, things would be better. I think there's a fundamental bias, in the sense that it will never distribute power equally amongst all of us, right?
It will always concentrate among the people with charisma, connections, money, , and certain attributes like ‘confidence.’ That means some voices will just not be in the rooms where decisions are made, and this will have ripple effects, you know, on all of us.
Adam Davis: There's a sentence in the book where you note that we kind of like to think of ourselves as democrats, but we don't practice it a lot.
We don't use this mechanism of selecting democratically. It's always mediated and always rewards the bold, the charismatic, the wealthy. Do you have a sense of why we've moved so far from thinking that this obviously more democratic system is not part of most of what we do when we call ourselves democrats?
Hélène Landemore: I think it comes down to ideology, meaning the dominant frameworks through which we interpret terms like democracy, freedom, equality, all of these things. And they were defined for us a long time ago, I would say. Sometime between the seventeenth century and now, we decided that democracy meant elections, that consent at the ballot booth was enough of an expression of consent and a form of freedom and a form of power.
And that was kind of the end of it, and we've been repeating this mantra and saying, "Look, we already live in a democracy, and we're just gonna deepen it by expanding the suffrage to women, to poor people, to people of color, to minorities of all kinds." And so we're just deepening this democracy that we've defined as a system in which we elect our leaders from roughly the eighteenth century onwards.
And we kind of forgot or looked at the ancient Athenians' precedent as an outlier, sort of a exotic exception, something that's just not for us moderns. Then you've got all kinds of rationalizations that are not all bad like, "Well, we moderns do not want this kind of liberty of the ancients because it's too time-consuming. You'd have to be involved all the time, and you'd have to have a slave economy on the back of which you can actually devote time to politics. So because we are moderns, and we are consumers, and we work, and we have private pursuits, we prefer to have a division of labor that delegates the tasks of politicking to politicians."
Except that I think this was a mistake and that we've basically handed over too much power to this political class, to the point that even our modern liberty has been diminished. If you don't control the framework, the structures of the world you live in, or you only control it very, very indirectly through the choice of people you send to power, I think you lose. You lose a lot.
That's part of the explanation. But to be fair, this passage you quote from the book, it's actually from Bernard Manin. It’s his analysis of why we forgot about ‘lot’ sometime between the 18th and 19th century. ‘Lot,’ which was a mechanism of selection that everyone was aware of, that political theorists talked about and identified with authentic democracy, dropped out of the picture.
And we don't really have a good explanation as to why. I think, for example, in Switzerland, they were still using it in various ways in the early 19th century. But somehow after the French Revolution happened and became a sort of beacon of, you know, modernity, people wanted to copy it or copy the American Constitution, which were all centered on elections.
So ‘lot’ became this irrational thing that was archaic and dated and maybe not modern enough. And I also think going back to this point about ideology, the 18th century is the age of reason, right? The age of enlightenment. But the Enlightenment is understood in an individualistic way. It's my reason, your reason.
And so if you replace my judgment, my choice, my vote by a lottery, you're replacing something which is desirable, that is normatively valuable and rational, by something that we cannot make sense of. Because the reality is that we made sense of the properties of ‘lot' when used with large numbers only, I would say, in the 19th century.
So a century later when statistics was invented, right? We started to understand that this thing called the law of large numbers works, right? If you take a large enough sample by lot from the source population, the demographic characteristics will magically match those of the larger population.
It's pretty spectacular. But if you don't understand why that works and the math behind it, you just think it's irrational. It's almost religious, right? And what always fascinated me is that the Greeks seem to have intuited all these mathematical properties of ‘lot’ but never theorized them, right?
They didn't have the tools. They didn't have the concept of probability, even. That's a concept that emerged late, 17, 18, 19th century. So that's my best guess. The lots didn't quite fit the ideological framework of social contract theory– the Age of the Enlightenment understood as an individual thing.
I think we're only now, in a way, ready to understand that if you want a smart collective, maybe there's something about the collective reason of the group that emerges from the way it's selected, the diversity that this generates, et cetera. So, there's a lot there.
Adam Davis: And I asked it as a kind of historical question, but I think I wanna ask, what are our assumptions about it now?
And the way I want to ask it is, again, by referring to a different quotation in the book, which is something like, "I'd rather have the first 2,000 people from the phone book than the people that we elect. I say it with some trepidation, that we'd be better off with a random selection than with choosing those we think should be in those positions.”
And so I wanna put the question to you now, not historically. You are more familiar with the sort of research around collective intelligence than probably many of us, although maybe as a group, we understand it in some native way.
Hélène Landemore: It takes some, some work though.
Adam Davis: Yeah. As with most things, we seem to defer to expertise and knowledge and practice.
So can you say a little bit about how you've become confident about a system like ‘lot’ delivering not only a good experience, which maybe we can talk more about later, but good outcomes?
Hélène Landemore: Hmm. Well, first you have to accept that politics is not a science and it's not a matter of expertise. That runs against everything we're told.
Like you need to have gone through law school and learned about the ins and outs of the Constitution. But no, I think the Greeks got it right. It's about the common good. It's about how do we collectively define what it is to lead a good life as a political unit, as a group of people with different preferences, different values, but a desire to live together and to live well together.
I don't think this requires any expertise. So I always use the example from the Protagoras, which is a text by Plato where he sets up this encounter between, Protagoras, the Sophist, and Socrates. And Socrates basically wants to skewer him because he claims to be teaching politics and political knowledge.
So he says, "Look, when we look at the practices of ancient Greece, I mean, what is contemporary democratic Athens for him, we let everyone in the ecclesia, in the open assembly, say whatever they want when it comes to matters of the common good. Doesn't matter whether you're rich or poor, whether you're charismatic or not, whether you speak well or you speak poorly or with an accent or whatnot.
Everybody has a right. It's a right and a power to say something about the common good and help decide whether we're gonna, for example, go to war with Sicily, 'cause after all, it was their blood or the blood of their sons that was at stake, or whether we're gonna build a temple to Athena or force the rich to pay for the new fleet, something like that.
And it's different from the situation where the question is technical, a question of expertise like, "Oh, how do we build a ship? What kind of ship?" But there you only want the architects and the people who know what they're talking about to speak up, and if some ignorant person tries to speak up about this issue, we boo them into silence.
That’s what they did. So politics is about the stuff that is not technical. But somehow in our super industrial, advanced, technologically complex, very large scale societies, we've convinced ourselves that politics is just too hard for people like us.
I think we should resist that very much.
Adam Davis: Mm-hmm. So we're all capable of weighing in on and making a decision about whether we should go to war?
Hélène Landemore: Well, for example, you could say we're not sending our own children these days. It's all professionals, professional armies. And still, it's our tax money.
It's, it's a number of things that I think should be in the hands of the people themselves, not decided with such secrecy, so little accountability. But that gets us into a different question. Because in theory, Congress should be making that decision of declaring war.
Adam Davis:But that should is according to the Constitution, but in a way, according to you, the ‘should’ may be that actually Congress shouldn't. That's what I'm trying to push on.
Hélène Landemore: At the very least it should be Congress making those decisions, but even that, I do agree that for something as momentous, I would want to have a more wide scale consultation or a sample of the people having a long deliberation about this, like a random sample.
Like a deliberative assembly taking the time to look at the evidence, to take the time to question and grill Congress people and, and just make sure that we're not again sold a war that is based on lies.
Adam Davis: Yeah. I mean, it's interesting because I can imagine that people will be more persuaded by the idea of a deliberative assembly chosen randomly around something like changing the taxation system. Where it's over time, and we can think about it reasonably and bring in the evidence. But I think the example that's often given is, what about war, damn it? We gotta make these decisions quickly.
Hélène Landemore: Okay. But there are two things. One is the momentous nature of the decision. I think war is one, and sometimes it's not an emergency.
So if there's no existential threat here now, I think there was enough of a window of time that you could consult more widely. Now, you could say, okay, what about emergency? We know that democracies are so inefficient, and now you wanna add an extra layer of deliberation among a randomly selected sample.
This is gonna take forever. Two things. Yes, there are emergency situations where you don't have the time to do this, but in that case, it doesn't mean there's no accountability still, right?
Adam Davis: Mm-hmm.
Hélène Landemore: And it could be that, you know, I was thinking of the Swiss model where you have an executive of seven people, right?
Not just one person. One person is such a risky bet.
Adam Davis: Why do you say that?
Hélène Landemore: So at least when you have seven, you can rotate them, and if one of them goes really crazy, there's always like some sort of quorum of people that you need to have on board to actually go to war. But finally, I would say, is it true that democracy takes such a long time to make decisions?
Again, Athens was a pretty nimble adversary against Sparta. It won wars. So they were able to have this emergency power for generals like Pericles and still maintain some accountability. So, I think these questions are more complicated. And I wouldn't say that war needs necessarily to be decided by referendum, but I think currently the enormous concentration of power in the executive is, to me, strikingly undemocratic and very dangerous for the stability of the world.
Adam Davis: And so in a way, moving from war back to the question of the shy. If I-- it's a little bit of a big jump, but I think in a way it's related, that some people want to make these decisions, put themselves forward, declare that they're qualified, and most of us don't. Most of us seem pretty comfortable yielding that in some way, even if we complain about it to those that put themselves forward.
So when you talk about the shy, what do you mean and how do you get them to step forward and take this stuff on, whether it's war or something a step back from that?
Hélène Landemore: So ‘the shy.’ It's a phrase that I borrow from the early twentieth century British essayist G.K. Chesterton. He said, "All real democracy is an attempt like that of a jolly hostess to bring the shy people out."
What I interpreted him as saying is something like, well, all the people who don't think they have it in them to say something interesting or who are used to being neglected or used to being invisible, used to lacking power. And it's not just because they're natural introverts or because they don't want that power, it's because they just don't think they can have it.
They've been socialized into feeling powerless, right? So I think a real democracy would be this renewed, constantly renewed, attempt to bring them out and bring them back to the center of the party and enjoy themselves and say something. And, to this point about some people want power, some people don't– again, the Greeks thought that it's better to give power to those who don't want it right? Because if you want power, you're much more likely to be corrupted by it, and it's much more likely to go to your head. And it's not clear that wanting power is predictive of capacity to use it well.
So at the very least, we should try to distribute it more widely and see what happens. I'm waiting to see what happens when the shy have an actual say.
Adam Davis: Mm.
Hélène Landemore: And maybe this will establish, as I predict that we will have, better rule.
Adam Davis: You're listening to The Detour with Hélène Landemore
What are the examples that build your confidence that if we make room for the shy, they'll step forward and the outcomes will be better than the outcomes that we generally see?
Hélène Landemore: So obviously I oscillate, right? As a social scientist, I would say we're not there.
Adam Davis: Okay.
Hélène Landemore: Because this sort of threshold for making any causal claim is super high.
Adam Davis: But vibes. What about vibes?
Hélène Landemore: Well. At the same time, I do think that if you think that having a good theory and some empirical evidence is maybe enough to act on, I think we're there. If you combine the theory plus more and more, an accumulation of empirical evidence in the field of what we call citizens assemblies, I think we see that ordinary citizens, when they're given the support they need, access to experts, enough time to deliberate, are perfectly capable of generating not just a coherent agenda, which was my prediction initially, but even things that look like laws and legislative measures and policies.
At least that's what I saw in France. So I come from France, originally from Normandy. I grew up there, and I studied in the US, but I went back recently to observe citizens assemblies that were conducted in my native country. On climate first and then on end of life issues. I was actually shocked when President Macron announced that he was organizing a citizens assembly on climate because I thought, "What a terrible idea.” It's too technical a topic. What if they don't manage to produce anything good, and then people will say, 'These things never work. Let's not do them again.'" I actually had that worry.
Adam Davis: Mm-hmm.
Hélène Landemore: So I thought he overshot a little bit by asking them literally to co-create with the government legislative measures that he would send directly to regulation, to a referendum, or to a parliamentary vote.
But they had nine months. They had 130 plus experts to rely on. They had an expert committee of I think 14 lawyers who helped them turn their proposals into the proper legalese. And they came up with what looked like, again, legislative products that a parliament could have generated.
That swayed me considerably.
Adam Davis: You've seen, you point to other examples in other places where the recommendations-
Hélène Landemore: Yes, there are other examples. In Ireland they were less specific you might say, but they were more like at the agenda-setting level, but they recommended to decriminalize abortion, and to facilitate same-sex marriage. They did some stuff on climate and gender diversity as well. Those proposals, which politicians had a very hard time passing on their own, they were gridlocked over them, they were able to put them to a referendum, and they passed. So again they worked in very different contexts.
What I'll grant is that we don't have enough fine-grained studies of all the citizens assemblies or mini-publics of other kinds that have happened in the world. So the OECD documents seven hundred thirty-three government-sponsored mini-publics in the world in the last twenty years. We need to know more about what happened and what was successful or not. There's more actually, if you count all the stuff that was not government sponsored. Jim Fishkin does so-called deliberative polls sometimes outside of government sponsoring, and they work really well. And there's one, if you're interested, you should Google that. It's called America in One Room.
And actually, I have an op-ed that came out today in The New York Times where I mentioned that example, and I go over the way in these assemblies, Republicans sort of change their minds when they're confronted with the data and the evidence and the arguments. And conversely, Democrats changed their minds on the baby bond issue, on minimum wage, stuff like that.
So, so you see that they work in the sense of arguably generating, more factually accurate and sensible beliefs and policy positions in a way that also brings the two polarized camps closer to each other and makes the possibility of formulating a consensual position much higher as well.
Adam Davis: So I hear a couple things in what you're saying, but the question I want to ask you now is actually more about what you pointed to towards the end, which is something happens in these assemblies which not only leads people to maybe move from their original position. They don't remain as dug in as they were when they first entered the room.
Uh, so now I don't want to ask about the, uh, recommendation, but more about the experience and what you see the experience doing for the people that participate.
Hélène Landemore: Well, for me as an academic who was primarily interested in the cognitive side of things and how people converge towards good arguments, accurate information, and all that, it was a bigger surprise to go in these assemblies and observe them and talk to people.
The surprise was love. The fact that people just bonded so much very quickly in one, two sessions, three sessions. They became close, they became caring and attentive to each other and it was really striking. At the end when we asked them, "Okay, what was your main takeaway of this experience?"
There was this outpouring of gratitude and love. I think it's basically a place, the citizens' assembly, it's not the only place, of course, it happens in social movements, it happens in churches and every kind of environment where people interact intensely together with a purpose and a common goal.
Often it generates those emotions. But it was really touching to see that happen between people from different ideological camps, from different age groups, from different ethnicities, from different socioeconomic classes. The one friendship I remember that struck me the most was between a tattooed butcher and a retired, very proper banker, and just the mix was, you know, interesting.
At least in the French context, it doesn't feel like these gaps between people are crossed so easily. And in that context, they were very strikingly so. It's like the opposite of politics as usual. It's not toxic. It's not based on resentment and the kind of rage that both parties are cultivating towards each other at the moment, and have for decades. It's the opposite. It's like healing the social fabric, knitting it back together pretty much. And I think we need more of that.
Adam Davis: It seems very clear that in many rooms people lament the problem of division, polarization, whatever the word is, that many of us, whatever your political views, seem to recognize that we've ended up in a place that's divided in unhelpful ways. I think then I wanna ask, okay, how do we go from the intensely divided place we seem to be in now that many people recognize toward the happier, more loving, more inclusive place you're describing?
Uh, what makes you sanguine about the possibility that we can make that move?
Hélène Landemore: I think I'm born that way. I'm just optimistic, so I don't know if there's anything in the real world that should make me optimistic, but I keep going. So I... my answer to that question, how do we get from here to there, it's always, well, just keep walking.
It's the only way. I think that my experience is that if you have a good idea or, you know, if there is a good idea, you should embrace it, share it, try to bring it about, and then somehow... that's the thing about collective intelligence, which is this almost mysterious thing that I've studied a lot.
It’s not really easy to predict or control, but it will materialize and emerge in different ways. Too often, governments will use the pretense of citizens' assemblies to do a bit of what's called participation-washing and look good for a minute and then ignore us. But again, I think we have to keep trying and spreading awareness, getting people to support these things, demand more of them, put pressure on their legislators.
And very long term, I have to say, I think my ideal would be that we move to a model where potentially citizens' assemblies become permanent as they've become in Ostbelgien. There's a part of Belgium where everybody speaks German. It's eighty thousand people roughly, and they've institutionalized a permanent citizen council of twenty-four randomly selected people who have the power to set in part the agenda for the local parliament and to convene citizens' assemblies on one-off topics.
That's a good model. I mean, again, as I say, the next step would be potentially to displace the parliament entirely and just have a citizens' assembly that makes those decisions instead.
Adam Davis: So even in what you just said, there's a sort of delightful and I think unusual combination of wonky and dreamy.
Hélène Landemore: Okay. I'll take that as a compliment.
Adam Davis: That's how I mean it, and I think the combination strengthens both. And often we tend to have more of one or more of the other. But as we move towards opening to questions, I wanna ask you to indulge the dreamy side a little bit. So we call this series this year Beyond Two Fifty. When you look forward 250 years and you think about governance, what's the dream about how it looks?
You've gone back to Athens. You've gone back 2,500 years, so looking forward 250 should be nothing.
Hélène Landemore: I think it would be a combination of the best traits of Switzerland, Athens, the US, France,the advanced democracies that are functional in some respects, and Taiwan, which has a fantastic method to consult people at scale through digital tools, AI tools, but in a way that preserves, you know, data anonymity, data sovereignty, is not exploitative or a tool of mass surveillance or government surveillance.
And I think that there's so much potential. We're just so stuck in our ways. I think we can learn from all these different experiences. So my vision right now, I'm not sure it's the right one, but if you have a large central, maybe 500, maybe 1,000 randomly selected assembly that sets the agenda for the next four or five years.
It works in tandem with another large randomly selected assembly that's focused on very, very long-term questions, climate, environment, put some constraints on the more short-term assembly. And then this assembly, uh, maybe every four or five years puts this agenda that they come up--came up with to the larger public in referenda.
And, I would say, like in Switzerland, we should have about three to four referenda a year so that we get to decide on whether we like that agenda as a whole, but also whether we like some sub-questions that are a bit controversial. Then you would have sub-assemblies that are also selected at random, but maybe some of them could be elected from within that pool. But you would not have parties and all these groups that in my view pit people against each other, replace the concern for the common good with personal pursuits and rent-seeking, as we say in my jargon.
That's the sort of core legislative structure. You still have a judiciary appointed, it's fine, but unlike now in the US, it wouldn't be supreme over the legislative. Would be, , subordinated to it actually, , when it comes to like, for example, I think the referenda should be the final expression of sovereignty like they are in Switzerland.
There's nothing above the people in Switzerland. And then you will have an executive, but the executive would be purely in the function of executing the law, not legislating like it is today, accruing all the power that Congress is just letting go of. It would just be a plural body of people not elected through universal suffrage, but selected in some other fashion.
Not entirely sure which one, but I don't... I think we should depersonalize the executive. In Switzerland, as I said, there's a body of seven people. No one knows their names. What? No one cares. And so, you know, it's a lot more mature and in my view it’s a better form of democracy when you care more about the laws and the procedures than when you care about the charisma of one person or another.
I think this presidential function is a leftover of medieval times, basically. Like, "Okay, we wanted a king, you have a king." And it's putting us in the position of supplicants, you know? In France, we are... Everything revolves around the figure of Macron, you know? And so you hate him, you love him, you look up to him for every answer.
And it means the other institutions are infantilized. They're ignored, they're minimized, and it's not allowing people to take ownership of politics the way they should. They look up to the prince constantly, and I don't think that's healthy or democratic.
Adam Davis: Mm-hmm. I guess, again, there's so much in there, and the combination of what feels to me quite radical thinking about this word that we use all the time, that is democracy, and real attention in this book and in previous books to lots of specific examples.
So if you find yourself intrigued, moving towards wanting to learn more about this, I would say there's lots of places you could go, and I recommend Hélène's books. They're full of great examples, moving examples, and examples that also hold questions. Let's open and invite people to come up to this microphone or to send questions in online with a note that there are people moving there rapidly.
Joe Smith: Believe it or not, my name is Joe Smith. In government, there are the decision makers and the folks who carry out the decisions. Intriguing as your ideas are, would you comment on the risk or the likelihood that things ultimately would be decided by the bureaucracy--
Hélène Landemore: Hmm ...
Joe Smith: rather than the decision makers?
Hélène Landemore: Thank you. Excellent question. So indeed, that's a worry I get a lot from people who say, "But these randomly selected citizens, they are inexperienced, they're naive, they're easy to capture. They don't know enough to know when they don't know." So what's gonna happen is that the bureaucracy in place, whether the bureaucracy internal to the assembly themselves or the larger bureaucracy will just do whatever they want.
Well it's a very real danger. I think it's already a danger with elected officials, right? Because they're not permanent, and so bureaucracies can afford to ignore them. I don't have a silver bullet to this problem, but my observation of citizens assemblies suggests that citizens are not naive.
They're not easy to manipulate. They push back. I'll give you an example. When we did the citizens convention on climate in France, at some point, one of the citizens on Twitter said, "Hey, Macron, why don't you come and visit us in our assembly?" And he replied, "Sure, I'll come." So they had already bypassed the governance structure in place because they had issued this invitation without asking for permission, so that's already a sign of autonomy.
And then later, President Macron changed his mind. He said, "Well, why don't you come over to me in my Palace? And I'll give you, you know, petits four and champagne, and it will be lovely." And they said, "No, we're not interested. We want to have a working session with you, so you have to come to us to talk about climate, and you cannot lecture from a podium. You have to sit down at a table with us on the same level as us." The governance committee of that convention said, "You guys are crazy. You do not say no to the President of France." But in the end, they won. President Macron came to them, sat down at the table, and worked with them. So I think it's a pretty good sign of a sense of agency and resistance to capture.
I've seen them push back against experts who were advising them to implement a carbon tax. They didn't want to look like they were endorsing a solution that Macron wanted, so you could see that they were very resistant to capture in that sense. Does that guarantee that that capture won't happen?
No. But compared to the capture that's currently going on in Congress, for example, the bar is pretty low. I mean...
Adam Davis: Great. Thank you.
Catherine Chevigny: My name's Catherine Chavigny. I have a question about political equality and how it's ... I can see how the thread moves from Athens where the vote was by lottery in democracy all the way up to the citizen assemblies.
So I thought maybe you could talk a little bit more about the concept of political equality and how it, it feeds into your thought.
Hélène Landemore: Yes. I don't know if it's gonna have the historical dimension you want, but for me, it's this idea that we're epistemic peers, right? We all have the same right to have a say about the definition of the common good and how we want to live our lives in common.
And the beauty of political equality is also kind of instrumental in the sense that when you use it right, you generate deliberations that are more conducive to good outcomes, and you generate predictions through an aggregation of individual judgments weighed equally that are more likely to predict the right outcomes.
That's a part of my research that is controversial and you don't have to, you know, buy it, but that's my take on political equality.
JT Flowers: My name is JT Flowers. I'm a senior advisor and director of government affairs at a group called the Albina Vision Trust. Our power building model is very much rooted in this notion of community having the answers to our larger problems.
But I think it works in our context for a very particular reason. We come from a community that was quite intentionally pushed to the margins of the American body politic and can use that experience to inform the way we think about shaping a more equitable society moving forward. My question for you is whether in your view, sortition must fundamentally rely on a level playing field to produce equitable outcomes, particularly for people shoved to the margins of the body politic.
When I think about juries I can't help but think about them in the American context, where so often they have produced outcomes that are extremely inequitable. How do you hedge against the worst impulses of the body politic? And is there a model of sortition that you can imagine producing better outcomes when the playing field is not level?
Hélène Landemore: Mm. Wow.
So, uh, first of all, I should say that, you know, random selection and deliberation, have virtues, but they cannot necessarily produce outcomes that are completely detached from the existing prejudices of a given society. There's only so much you can get ahead of your own time, right? That said, I think having the space to deliberate and hear from everyone, including people who are kept segregated from the rest of the community, for example.
I mean, you could say, if they're already in the room, half the battle is won. But, if you institutionalize that, I think with strong facilitation to make sure the usual suspects are not, you know, imposing a certain view, I think you get some results that I think are already a victory.
That said, I think if you're talking about radical change in a context where there's a dominant majority that doesn't wanna budge, you might need other tools. You might need the usual tools of social movements and fighting much more aggressively for your rights. I'm not saying, you know, citizens assembly are the only approach.
In fact, they're-- to me, they're like the hardware of the system, but you need all the software, the soft tissues of, social movements that you cannot really legislate into life. They just spring up. They form, they link, they connect, and they push, and they put pressure.
They would put pressure on the deliberation of a random sample, as they did put pressure on the deliberations of elected officials.
Speaker 3: In Oregon, we have initiative, referendum and recall, and there's some historic pride around that. And yet there's arguments that it's corrupted by moneyed interests.
What is a defensive mechanism at the assembly level to help folks stay clear of that moneyed manipulation?
Hélène Landemore: Again, I don't think these things are immune to corruption. Of course, if the whole system is corrupt, and corporate interests are everywhere, there's nothing you can do at this point.
You need to take care of the corporate corruption first or it needs to be in tandem. And one way I could see that is by reforming the corporate governance of big companies, including tech companies, social media companies, by having more say given to users, given to employees, given to civil society.
So I know it sounds unthinkable in the US for some reason, but in Europe we've had schemes of so-called co-determination whereby in large companies you have representation of employees on the board of directors. You have things like cooperatives. You have all kinds of interesting ways of diffusing power, at least, and not concentrating it so much just among the investors. I think it changes the nature of the decisions that are made, the kind of thing that companies think they are morally allowed to do, you know, from the inside. 'Cause if you count on just external legislation, which seems a privileged path in the US, it's not happening.
Something has to change from the inside. So that would be my tentative solution for capture and things like that.
Speaker 7: So in a world where we're seeing some of the dangers of the skepticism of expertise, you described in the French examples a scaffolding of experts, subject matter experts, and legal experts to help the citizens.
Those experts themselves are presumably citizens and non-politicians. What's magic about the amateurs versus the experts who are helping them?
Adam Davis: Thanks.
Hélène Landemore: There's, there's nothing magic about amateurs. It's just that, when it comes to the definition of the common good, the arbitrage between values, they bring in a wealth of experience, a diversity of profiles, of knowledge, of range, of heuristics.
Whereas experts know a lot, sometimes they are very homogenous in their ways of approaching a problem in a way that gets them stuck. So for example, the carbon tax is certainly a very good idea, but when the question that was posed to the citizens was, "How do you reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40% of the 1990s levels without creating social injustice or causing a social rebellion like the Yellow Vest?"
Maybe the carbon tax isn't the right solution for the French context because it is what caused the Yellow Vest rebellion. So, the fact that the experts come at it with just this super technocratic mindset of, "Oh, we just wanna reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but we have nothing to say about social justice," they cannot really answer the question, it turns out.
So, whereas amateurs, they're not magic, they're just... And I wouldn't describe them as amateurs necessarily, I would describe them as citizens with a different kind of expertise, a user expertise. But among them you had architects, you had lawyers, you had engineers. Because the group is so large, there's always one engineer or one lawyer who is able to push back against a claim by an engineer or a lawyer.
It's very interesting. They're citizens, but they actually have in their midst some of the expertise that is presented to them by these citizens who are also experts. By the way, the thing I find very interesting, we live, especially in the US, in an age of absolute defiance towards experts because they got us into the Iraq War, because they got us into the 2008 crisis, because they lied about Biden's cognitive decline, because...
It's just like the conspiracy theory around proved to be true, so it's very worrying and nobody can trust anything anymore. But in the context of citizens assemblies, what I saw was the diffidence between citizens and experts diminished and respect emerged. Because, of course, they first assumed the worst.
The experts come in assuming total ignorance. The citizens come in assuming they're here to manipulate us. But by the end of the couple of months, they actually worked hand-in-hand and had great respect for each other, and they find the right positioning. And the positioning was, as I always say, citizens on top and experts on tap.
Speaker 8: We've mentioned juries a lot, but people don't typically like jury duty.
People try and get out of jury duty. It's like a punchline that you don't wanna be on jury. So how can we ensure that people actually want to show up to these deliberative assemblies when their name is called, as opposed to being like, "Ugh, I gotta go to this thing"?
Hélène Landemore: Well, again, my experience of observing citizens assembly is that people like these things very much.
They come sometimes for the money, 'cause remember they are paid for their time. So for a lot of people, it's a lifeline. In France it was 85 euros a day, later on 95 euros a day. In the US it's, I'm not sure, but it's been minimum wage. If you do multiple weekends, it adds up. So they come for that in some cases.
Uh, they stay because everything is paid for them, so it's a nice trip to Paris, a train ticket to the metropolis for people living in the overseas territories for French people. Dinners, everything is covered. Uh, your childcare is covered. You get to meet people from all kinds of horizons that you would have never met otherwise.
You make friends, and you start having fun. You're learning stuff. You're meeting the president of France. You're meeting experts. You all of a sudden maybe discover you're capable of way more than you thought. And I think right now in France there's the thinking that we should create a diploma of some kind or some sort of recognition for the experience that people can take to employers and maybe get, they could get hired as facilitators or advisors on other experiments like that, or they could get some kind of tax credit for the donation of their time to the nation. We can get creative.
Adam Davis: Can you please join me in saying a huge thanks to Hélène Landemore?
Hélène Landemore is Professor of Political Science at Yale University and the author of Politics Without Politicians: The Case for Citizen Rule and Open Democracy. You can learn more about Hélène in our show notes at oregonhanities.org.
Thanks for listening to The Detour from Oregon Humanities. Anna McClain is our producer. Ally Silvester, Karina Briski, and Ben Waterhouse are our assistant producers. Our transcript is by Tom Williams. This is Adam Davis. See you next timeHélène