Review of Landemore’s Politics Without Politicians in The Guardian

Review of Landemore’s Politics Without Politicians in The Guardian

Posted on March 7, 2026 by Yoram Gat

A review of Hélène Landemore’s Politics Without Politicians by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian makes the predictable points. Substance aside, the very fact that an article in a wide circulation newspaper has the subheading

A Yale professor’s radical proposal to replace elected leaders with ordinary people, chosen by lottery

should be seen as a positive development.

The title of the review prefigures the content:

[C]ould we get rid of Farage, Truss and Trump?

Clearly we need to get rid of some politicians, but not all of them.

No Donald Trump, Nigel Farage or Liz Truss; no Zack Polanski, Jacinda Ardern or Volodymyr Zelenskyy either. No political parties and no elections, but instead a random bunch of ordinary people chosen by lottery to run the country for two-year spells, like a sort of turbo-charged jury service except with the jurors holding an entire country’s fate in their hands.

Hinsliff likes the feel good stories about “the human benefits of participation”.

The best bits of the book, worth reading for anyone interested in combating polarisation, are the unexpectedly moving chapters explaining the human benefits of participation for the French citizen jurors in particular. These range from the forging of lasting friendships and deeper civic bonds to the breakthroughs that can happen when strangers meet face to face and genuinely try to understand each other’s points of view, instead of merely yelling at each other on social media.

Giving people actual policy making power in serious matters, is, however, clearly, absurd.

Where I stopped being convinced is when Landemore leaps from demonstrating that citizen juries have been an effective means of considering specific issues to arguing that they’re capable of running countries, and so elected parliaments can just be abolished.

Some of these are people, after all, work in Tesco[!].

What if, having discovered they’re unexpectedly good at running the country, [the allotted] don’t want to go back to working at Tesco?

With sortition we will no way to express our fury if those hoi polloi if (or, really, inevitable, when) they screw up. It is, it seems, the great advantage of elections that we can feel relief by voting out those who screwed us over the last term in favor of those who screwed us over the term that preceded the last one.

What if they screw up so badly that a furious nation wants them out? Democracy’s greatest safeguard is the right to remove rotten rulers at the ballot box, but instead Landemore proposes a constant rolling programme of referendums on major issues to ensure the lottocrats are doing what the people want.

Really, of course, what we need is experts, experts and more experts.

But perhaps the biggest flaw in the thesis is the mismatch between the knotty ethical problems she describes citizens’ assemblies resolving and the threats Britain faces now: autocracy abroad, rising extremism at home, economic stagnation fuelling both. Issues of social change – abortion or same-sex marriage in Ireland, say, or climate action in France – absolutely do lend themselves to the wisdom of crowds given years to properly unpick an issue. Waking up to discover that Donald Trump has annexed Greenland, your budget has caused a run on the pound or that a killer pandemic has broken out do not. In a crisis, this country rarely finds that it has had enough of experts or experience.

Yes, we hate those politicians (well, some of them). But can anyone really expect that some people picked off of the streets or off of their menial jobs at Tesco would do any better?

Landemore is right that politics can be frustrating, disappointing, downright unedifying: that it’s prone to corruption, elite groupthink, privileging what a handful of very rich people want over what the masses want, and attracting overconfident alpha types who talk over more thoughtful people.

But these aren’t things you can abolish just by abolishing professionals and hoping their amateur replacements don’t develop all the same vices under the same pressures and temptations. (Why wouldn’t vested interests lobby a people’s parliament, just as they lobby the professional kind? What stops power going to the heads of citizen MPs plucked from obscurity to run the country, and turning the revolution sour? Did George Orwell write Animal Farm for nothing?)

The biggest flaw in any political system is ultimately people – those in power but also sometimes the ones who voted for them – and unfortunately they’re the one non-negotiable. Of course it’s tempting, given the state of the world today, to think anyone could do better than this lot. But this book doesn’t make me want to risk finding out the hard way.

Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Participation, Press, Sortition |

8 Responses

Anonymous, on March 7, 2026 at 1:31 pm said:

We’re waiting for the Yoram Gat review of the book.

LikeLiked by 1 person
Anonymous, on March 7, 2026 at 4:37 pm said:

Every time, it’s a failure to acknowledge the clear and present catastrophe that is electoral politics….

LikeLiked by 1 person
keithsutherland, on March 8, 2026 at 8:59 am said:

On the other hand, those of us looking for magic bullets should read this op ed on the danger of certainty:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1w5z1d447lo

LikeLike
Anonymous, on March 8, 2026 at 12:14 pm said:

I see a two tier system being highly effective. Use lotteries locally to create a citizen assembly for every constituency.

think of it like a personal think tank for each elected MP. The local citizen assembly/jury can be given the time information and resource to think through and read the bills that the mp is being asked to vote on that week.
they could suggest changes to the wording and make recommendations for the mp.

crucially the MPs actual vote in parliament could be compared with the recommendations of the constituency assembly.
if the MP went against it too many times the local constituency could kick them out.
min this way the mp could really be held to account by its constituency. Moreover if every constituency had one of these there would be a layer of citizens across the entire country being paid to scrutinize the work of the MPs.

I think this would severely disrupt the ability of the political parties to drive agendas and sway MPs. Imagine if every MP was now suddenly non-partisan.

more like a professional steward than a ideologically minded representative of only a narrow sub-group in each constituency.

The layer of participatory civic infrastructure would act like a layer in a neural net. It could compress and connect the information from millions of citizens and bring it with laser focus to bear on the steward in the House of Commons.

I think we could add a deliberative chamber to the House of Commons where non-partisan stewards could deliberate – not shout or argue across the floor. But actually connect and speak.

If we though of political parties as trees, and the politicians as their fruiting bodies then we see that decision making us made behind the scenes by a small group of people in each party.

with clever use of lotteries and elections together, we can uproot those trees and form a single tree – society! We can build a 20000 cohort of citizens of all political affiliations who are constantly deliberating locally about how national policy affects each constituency. These political juries would be a layer that helps scrutinize professional non-partisan stewards, who could be replaced by elections. But also improves the decision making of the steward, as well as ending the political party structure.

the stewards hold the power but they are coupled much more strongly to citizen needs and goals.

LikeLike
deepdark103, on March 9, 2026 at 11:30 am said:

No one trusts experts since COVID. No one trust politicians since forever.

If randos screw up, we know whom to blame: the people. But the people want someone else to blame. That’s why we have experts and politicians.

LikeLike
keithsutherland, on March 9, 2026 at 12:30 pm said:

>the people want someone else to blame. That’s why we have experts and politicians.

Then lottocracy will end in tears. The saying of the Athenian rhetor “I advised but you chose”, would suggest the ongoing need for a whipping boy, especially if we claim that vox populi = vox dei.

LikeLike
Nicholas Gruen, on March 10, 2026 at 9:45 am said:

Fwiw, here’s the intro to an extract from the review that I’ve penned for my weekly newsletter.

Hélène Landemore is probably the premier academic ‘theorist’ of deliberative democracy. She’s just published a book in which she goes the whole hog trying to sketch out what it would be like to have a political system dominated, as Athens’ political system was, by sortition. That is, lots of important bodies being appointed by lottery.

Personally, this is not my favourite genre. I have two concerns. First, replacing an existing power structure with an entirely different one is never going to happen given the powerlessness of intellectuals. Nor should it happen given our experience with such things. I’m happier arguing something I’m extremely confident about: that sortition can profoundly improve and calm down our febrile, polarised politics by culture war.

Be that as it may, it is a perfectly valid intellectual exercise to follow the same path as Thomas More in Utopia and sketch out a fully working, entirely alternative model.

In any event, here is a review of the book. It is not a very carefully thought-out review. To provide just one example of what I mean, it takes the fact that the citizens are amateurs and deduces that this is the end of expertise in government. But how about just a little steel-manning of the argument for sortition? Our parliamentarians might be professionals at politics, but beyond that, they’re every bit as inexpert as others in the community. As you would expect, they seek expert input and generally take it except in the many and important circumstances where it would place them at a competitive disadvantage. It’s not very clear to me why the reviewer thinks the same wouldn’t happen with sortition-based bodies.

LikeLike
keithsutherland, on March 10, 2026 at 12:45 pm said:

>it is a perfectly valid intellectual exercise to follow the same path as Thomas More in Utopia and sketch out a fully working, entirely alternative model.

Albeit a satirical one. Peter Stone’s JoS review article on Maurice Stone’s book also classifies it under “democratic utopia” (and comes to a similar conclusion to the Guardian reviewer of Helene’s book). And is it really true to say that Athen’s political system was “dominated” by sortition? Fifth-century Athens was a direct democracy, with sortition employed to fill administrative magistracies.

LikeLike