Equality by lot

Hélène Landemore has a new book out, Politics Without Politicians: The Case for Citizen Rule. The book description is as follows:

Politicians have failed us. But democracy doesn’t have to.

Bought by special interests, detached from real life, obsessed with reelection. Politicians make big promises, deliver little to nothing, and keep the game rigged in their favor. But what can we do?

In Politics Without Politicians, acclaimed political theorist Hélène Landemore asks and answers a radical question: What if we didn’t need politicians at all? What if everyday people—under the right conditions—could govern much better?

With disarming clarity and a deep sense of urgency, Landemore argues that electoral politics is broken but democracy isn’t. We’ve just been doing it wrong. Drawing on ancient Athenian practices and contemporary citizens’ assemblies, Landemore champions an alternative approach that is alive, working, and growing around the world: civic lotteries that select everyday people to govern—not as career politicians but as temporary stewards of the common good.

When regular citizens come together in this way, they make smarter, fairer, more forward-thinking decisions, often bringing out the best in one another. Witnessing this process firsthand, Landemore has learned that democracy should be like a good party where even the shyest guests feel welcome to speak, listen, and be heard.

With sharp analysis and real-world examples, drawing from her experience with deliberative processes in France and elsewhere, Landemore shows us how to move beyond democracy as a spectator sport, embracing it as a shared practice—not just in the voting booth but in shaping the laws and policies that govern our lives.

This is not a book about what’s wrong—it’s a manifesto for what’s possible. If you’ve ever felt powerless, Politics Without Politicians will show you how “We the People” take back democracy.

The book’s title sounds encouragingly militant, and seems to indicate that Landemore is going farther than she did in her previous book, Open Demcoracy. At the same time it is hard not to notice even in the description above some of the familiar and less-than-useful jargon of “deliberative democracy” that undermined the more audacious parts of Open Demcoracy. Are we really supposed to believe that shyness is a major obstacle to democracy? Still, when a Yale professor goes with the title of “Politics Without Politicians”, and wins praise not only from Thomas Piketti, but from economics Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu, the overall impression is that the idea of sortition as an alternative to electoralism, rather than a way to shore it up, is making some headway, even in academic circles.

Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Sortition |